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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



S^qt + ©ujujiigl/l !ftr- 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



OLD OCEAN 



J" 

ERNEST INGERSOLL 



ILLUSTRATED 







o 



MAS 3 1883, 

s No. .#3.3. Xrr^- 



BOSTON 
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY 

32 FRANKLIN STREET 



JLft 




Copyright, 1883. 
D. Lothrop & Company. 



CONTENTS. 



I 146,000,000. Square Miles of Water 

II, Waves and Currents .... 

III. Early Voyages, and the South Pole 

IV. The polar Regions 
V. Ships and their Rigging . 

VI. War-ships and naval Battles 

VII. Robbers of the Sea 

VIII. The Merchants of the Sea 

IX. The Dangers of the Deep . 

X. Life under the Waves 

XL Sea Animals — the lesser Half 

XII. Sea Animals — the greater Half 



7 

25 
45 
63 
79 
102 
119 
135 
154 
170 
185 
204 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Hauling in the life-saving Car. 

Over the ever-restless Surface . 

In the same Latitude . 

Ocean Currents and Trade-winds 

Eruption of Mt. Erebus 

"It is by means of Sledges, and not 

Ship with all Sails set. 

3-Mast-schooner, Tow-boat, Brig, etc 

Sloop ... . 

Cat-boat, Fishing Schooner . 

The Battle of Trafalgar 

A robber Ship 

Taking Pilot in rough Weather; 

Harbor 

Gathering Sea-weed 
Lobster-fishing ; Pearl-oyster-fishing 
Cod-fishing 



OF S 



HIPS 



Page. 
Front. 
19 



Boston 



35 
39 

57 
75 
80 

83 
86 
96 

"3 

123 

141 

175 
191 
211 



OLD OCEAN. 



I.— 146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 

OFTEN things familiar to us present an entirely- 
different picture if only we change our point of 
view. I used to know a boy who, whenever he had 
gazed for a time at a bit of landscape, would turn his 
back upon it, bend over, and try how it appeared seen 
from between his feet. ' The effect was certainly very 
novel. Suppose, now, we take a globe, or a map of 
the world, and, neglecting the continents, whose out- 
lines are well remembered, study the area occupied by 
water. I warrant you a new impression of our globe 
will be forced upon us. Very likely we never before 
have really appreciated the vastness of this vast, blank, 
intervening space between the lands. Spread out a 
map of the whole world, stand back and look at it. 
The largest continents become simply islands; the 

7 



8 OLD OCEAN. 

great islands dwindle to islets, and the little ones 
disappear altogether — 

" . . . and, poured round all, 
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste." 

Looking at the land, we divide the surface of the 
earth into eastern and western hemispheres ; but look- 
ing at the water, we make an opposite classification. 
Encircle the globe in your library with a rubber band, 
so that it cuts across South America from about 
Porto Allegre to Lima on one side, and through 
southern Siam and the northernmost of the Phil- 
ippine islands on the other, and you make hemis- 
pheres, the northern of which (with London at its 
centre) contains almost all the land of the globe, 
while the southern is almost entirely water, Australia 
and Patagonia being the only lands of consequence 
in its whole area. Observing the map in this way, 
noticing that, besides nearly a complete half-world of 
water south of your rubber equator, much of the 
northern hemisphere also is afloat, you are willing to 
believe my assertion that there is almost three times 
as much of the outside of the earth hidden under the 



146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 9 

waves as appears above them — one hundred and 
forty-six million square miles of endlessly restless 
surface. 

But in bulk, as well as in space, the ocean is 
mightier than the land. There are very few mountain 
peaks whose topmost pinnacles tower as high above 
the tide-level as incredibly wide areas of ocean-bottom 
are sunk below it; and, while the great majority of 
land everywhere is only a few hundred feet above the 
surface of the sea, the average depth of the Atlantic is 
over ten thousand feet, and that of the Pacific and 
Indian oceans even greater. If, then, Nature were to 
plane down the earth with its mountain-ranges, in 
order to fill the ocean-valleys and make a perfectly 
smooth surface all over the globe, she would find it 
needful to dig away all the dry land of the globe, and 
also much which is submerged ; and then salt water 
would cover everything with a uniform depth of 
more than a mile — just as I think it used to. That 
was long ago. Though we speak of ancient rocks 
and everlasting rivers and hoary mountains, the ocean 
is older than any of them — older than anything else, 
except, perhaps, the atmosphere, which is the ocean's 



10 OLD OCEAN. 

mother. Many scientific men believe that when our 
planet first went circling swiftly in its orbit it was a 
glowing mass of molten, mixed-up metals, minerals 
and gases, which only held its shape because it was 
spinning so rapidly and racing on with such speed 
that no one particle of it had time to get the start of any 
other. They believe it was enveloped in thick masses 
of fiery vapors, and if there was any solidity about it 
anywhere, it certainly was not near the surface. But 
as time went on, the icy chill of space cooled these 
vapors slowly down; and all the time chemical 
changes went on within their masses, bringing this 
and that element together and separating others ; 
causing some gaseous - materials to make their way 
towards the centre and others to seek the outside, 
until, finally, water came into existence. 

After that — let us picture it — what deluges of 
rain were poured out of and down through those 
murky clouds where thunders bellowed and light- 
nings warred ! At first, all the rains that fell were 
turned to steam again, as would be a cupful of 
water thrown into a blast furnace ; but by and by 
the steady down-pour cooled the shaping globe so 



146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. II 

that all the water was not evaporated, but some 
stayed where it fell, and this increased in amount 
more and more, until finally, between the hissing 
core of the half-hardened planet and the dense clouds 
which kept out all the sunlight, there rolled the 
heated waves of the first ocean — an ocean not only 
shoreless from pole to pole, but boiling hot, and 
sending up ceaseless volumes of steam. 

Yet all the while the cooling of the planet went 
slowly on, and presently a crust or skin like the leather 
covering of a ball formed over the hitherto almost fluid 
surface of the mass. Now when any heated substance 
cools, it contracts. The, world, being of huge size, 
contracted on a large scale ; and as the cooling went 
on faster in some parts than in others, and unequally 
at various seasons, and was disturbed by explosions 
and swelling from underneath, the contraction was 
highly irregular, and produced great cracks and ridges. 
These were most prominent around the North Pole, 
as is shown by the fact that the land of the globe is 
mainly grouped around that pole, and their range 
was in general north and south lines. Such were 
the results of contraction upon this first weak crust 



12 OLD OCEAN. 

of the earth ; those parts which were stifTest resisting 
contraction, or simply bulging up, while great areas 
of thinner crust sank inward. Into these huge 
depressions which were constantly changing, but 
with less and less frequency, as the warping heat 
continually decreased, poured the wide waste of 
waters, the ridges between forming the earliest shores 
of this black primeval sea. 

How different from these beliefs of scientific men 
are the fanciful notions about the ocean in the 
writings that have come down from the days of 
those great empires in Egypt and Arabia and Syria ; 
from the kingdom of Phoenicia, the elegant civili- 
zation of Greece and the battle times of the Romans. 
The old Greeks, for example, regarded the earth 
as a flat space having a circular border, around 
which there was perpetually flowing a river that had 
no visible shore. This river was the source of all 
the rivers and other waters : out of it the sun lifted 
itself in the morning, to sink into it again on the 
other side of the plain ; the stars, too, rose and 
set in its flood ; and on its further banks, which 
no one had ever been able to reach, were the abodes 



146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 1 3 

of the dead. They also deified this outer water 
under the name of Oceanus ; and when men had 
travelled a little further and learned that west of 
Europe and south of Africa there really was a bound- 
less space of water, it was natural they should call 
it by the old poetic name, Oceanus — the ocean. 

The ocean which the Phoenician and the Latin 
navigators knew almost exclusively — though they 
must have been somewhat acquainted with the 
Arabian and African edge of the Indian sea — was 
that west of Spain and separated from the Mediter- 
ranean by the Pillars of Hercules. To this water 
they gave a special name, the origin of which is 
explained by another myth. 

One of the very oldest and most venerable of 
the Greek gods was Atlas. The poets told all sorts 
of stories about him ; but whatever else he did, all 
agreed that he supported on his shoulders the pillars 
that upheld the sky. These pillars seemed to rest 
in the western waters, just beyond the sunset hori- 
zon. Later on, it was believed among the Greeks 
that out there, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, lay 
an island of great extent, yet forming only a passage- 



14 OLD OCEAN. 

way to a vaster continent beyond. Naturally, this 
unseen island was spoken of as the home of Atlas, 
— Atlantis, or Atlantica. 

But let us return to the early offices of the ocean 
waters upon this globe of ours. It is certain that 
the great waters and great lands have remained 
substantially in their present shape ever since they 
first became distinct, the first cooling throwing up 
certain portions which formed a model for the conti- 
nents, leaving all the rest of the globe in a series 
of great basins holding water — basins which grew 
deeper by the steady contraction and sinking of the 
crust in these the weakest spots. 

The moment it had shores to beat upon, that 
moment the ocean began to knock them to pieces 
and grind the fragments under its pounding surf. 
These fragments sank wherever the currents bore 
them or the water was still enough to allow them 
to be deposited — sometimes in coarse particles, 
sometimes in fine silt — and there hardened gradually 
into stone, which was arranged in layers or strata, 
and hence is called stratified rock. The primitive 
or original rock — New England's granite is as good 



146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 1 5 

an example of it as you can find — contains in a 
mixed state all the components of the future strati- 
fied rocks. The original rocks held the different forms 
of lime, magnesia, etc., to make the limestones ; the 
silica to make the gritty sandstones and quartzes; 
the alumina to make the clays, and so on. The sea 
not only was the agent to eat this old rich crust 
to pieces and respread it into strata, but to sort out 
for us the materials to a considerable extent, laying 
down beds of limestone by themselves, and sandstone, 
shales, marl, etc., by themselves. 

All this work upon a chaotic world was not done 
in one way, however. While with sledge-hammer 
blows old ocean's ponderous waves were crushing 
exposed points of the coasts, other of its agencies 
were busy elsewhere. For instance, when dry air 
comes in contact with water, it soaks up as much as 
it can carry in that invisible form — moisture. But 
this dampened air, being light, is continually rising, 
while the heavier dry air crowds underneath to rise 
in turn with its load of moisture until it reaches a 
height where the cold is great enough to turn the 
moisture into drops ; then it forms clouds, and by 



1 6 OLD OCEAN. 

and by these become too heavy and fall as rain. 
Doubtless you know this process very well already, 
but I repeat it to make sure of my next point. The 
atmosphere even now contains a small proportion of 
a powerful gas known as carbonic acid; in those early 
ages there must have been so much of it that no 
living thing could have breathed. Now this gas is 
absorbed by water, and every particle of moisture 
which the ocean sent up took along a little carbonic 
acid with it, and so helped to purify the atmosphere 
and make it fit for plants and animals later on. 

But don't think now that the carbonic acid was at 
that time all nuisance : it had its place in the plan. 
This acid is almost the only thing that will dissolve 
certain hard minerals, among them silica, the sub- 
stance of pure sand, and the various sorts of quartz 
and gems, and so enable water to take them up 
and carry them along. The rain, therefore, well armed 
with the carbonic acid of the thick air, by drop, by 
rivulet, and by flood, was wearing down the rugged 
mountains, filling up the gloomy chasms, levelling off 
the surface of the rough continents, and helping the 
ocean in sorting out the materials which, later on, 



146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 1 7 

should become useful to man as fertile soil, or be 
sought after as building-stones, as metals for man- 
ufacturing purposes, or as minerals precious for their 
beauty. 

Meanwhile, as time went on, the crust of the earth 
cooled and stiffened more and more until it became 
so stable that only slight and gradual changes of 
level took place outside of strictly volcanic reg- 
ions. 

Now I have run the risk of being voted tedious 
with this bit of geology and chemistry, in order to 
show how important a part the ocean has played, 
and is still performing, in remodelling the world ; 
and also to show that' it was done chiefly along the 
margins, building continents and large islands out at 
the edges just as fast as they were levelled down 
over their interiors ; so that, from being enormously 
lofty, narrow and precipitous, they became broad and 
(for the most part) flat. When you know that the 
whole vast plains of Hindostan are believed to have 
been added to primeval Asia, and the broad empires 
of Brazil and Patagonia to the central stem of South 
America, think what mighty mountains, to which the 



1 8 OLD OCEAN. 

present Himalayas and Andes are mere hills, have 
been cut down to supply materials ! 

Yet out toward the middle of the sea, hardly even a 
short hundred miles from the shore, little drifting 
soil could be carried before sinking, and so we feel 
sure that no new bottom of consequence has ever been 
thus formed. The great basins of the sea — what 
vast valleys, thousands of miles wide and from one 
to fifty thousand feet deep, they would make if we 
could see them emptied ! — have hardly been altered 
since creation. 

But the ocean, like other architects, did not work 
for nothing ; it took its pay for this big job of hewing 
a world into good shape in a sort of toll of minerals, 
which it holds suspended in its flood. The chief of 
these is salt, which has been dissolved out of the 
shores and bottom as time went on. Analyze sea- 
water, and you find that, besides the large amount of 
common salt (known to chemists as chloride of sodi- 
um), various other compounds of salt, lime, and other 
minerals, classified as sulphates, carbonates, iodides, 
bromides, and so forth, have been extracted. The 
lovely greens, purples, crimsons and scarlets painting 



140,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 21 

the wonderful coralines and sea-weeds dragged to light 
from depths of perpetual gloom, are largely dyed by 
these compounds. 

All these salts together amount to about four 
parts (by measure) in every hundred of sea-water, 
and make about one-thirtieth of the weight of the 
ocean. 

In many parts of the world, all the salt used 
is obtained by boiling down sea-water in vats; the 
salt being left in white crystals in the bottom of the 
kettle when the water is evaporated away. 

It was by this means that our great-grandfathers 
in New England provided themselves with salt; and 
at certain places on the coast of Maine and New 
Jersey the practice has been kept up until very re- 
cently by fishermen who use a large quantity of salt 
in curing their fish. These old salt-boiling camps on 
the desolate beaches were very picturesque affairs, 
but have about all disappeared now ; but they would 
come back if occasion called. An example of this 
happened during the Rebellion. There are no salt- 
wells or mines in the Southern States, and the Con- 
federates were obliged to open factories on the coast, 



2 2 OLD OCEAN. 

getting all their salt by boiling down the water, after 
the custom of a hundred years before. 

Besides this salt, which makes ocean water much 
more dense and heavy than fresh water, so an ob- 
ject may float in the former that would sink in the 
latter, and swimming much easier in the ocean than 
in a lake, sea-water contains two very valuable 
metals — gold and silver; and in such quantities that 
it is profitable to scrape the old copper sheathing of 
ship bottoms to secure the silver which has formed a 
film over its surface. Think of silver-plated frig- 
ates ! — that is what they all are after a long voyage; 
and somebody has estimated that the whole ocean 
holds no less than two millions of tons of the shin- 
ing metal. Silver is now worth about $1.20 an 
ounce : it will be a pretty problem for you to see 
how rich old Neptune would be if he had it all in 
coins. Then to it you must add his riches in gold, 
which can be ascertained when I tell you simply that 
from each ton of sea-water one grain of gold may 
be extracted, and that the total bulk of salt water on 
the globe is said to be 290,000,000 cubic miles. 
These are average figures, of course, for the density — 



146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 23 

that is, the amount of salt, etc., in a given quantity of 
wa ter — varies in different parts. Deep water is Salt- 
er than shallow, because the saline matters sink; 
equatorial districts salter than arctic, because of 
more rapid evaporation there; and the Mediterra- 
nean saltest of all, because, I suppose, it is not only 
in a hot latitude, but so confined that its waters 
do not change as freely as they do outside. There 
are springs of mineral water, and even of fresh water, 
in certain parts of the ocean ; and some of the lat- 
ter bubble up so forcibly that all the salt water is 
pushed aside, and ships are said to fill their water- 
casks at these sweet fountains in the midst of the 
open Pacific. 

The names of the different parts of the one great 
ocean are familar enough, but their boundaries must 
necessarily be ill-defined. The Atlantic lies between 
the Americas on the west, and Europe and Africa on 
the east. The Pacific spreads from the Americas 
on the east to Asia on the west; but its great 
southward expansion among the islands east of 
Australia is called the South Sea, and the expansion 
northward between Australia and Sumatra on the 



24 OLD OCEAN. 

east and Africa on the west, takes the name of the 
Indian Ocean — the smallest of all. Besides this, 
we speak of all the south-polar waters as the Antarc- 
tic sea, separating them from the southern exten- 
sion of the Pacific on one side, and the southern 
Atlantic on the other, by the Antarctic Circle. Simi- 
larly, the imaginary line of the Arctic Circle incloses 
the Arctic Ocean. But all these names and distinc- 
tions are for convenience, and in fact there is but 
one ocean, whose waters are alike and inseparable, 
and always intermingling, as will be explained in my 
chapter on Currents. 



Note. — An account of the fabled lost island of Atlantis may be found in 
Irving's Columbus, appendix to last volume. 



II.— WAVES AND CURRENTS. 

IF I start with the remark that the earth rolls from 
west to east, it is not because I think you do 
not know that, but to lay the foundation for some- 
thing further. Surrounding the globe is the great 
envelope of the atmosphere, forty miles or so thick, 
which revolves and travels with it, and is really a part 
of the planet. But this atmosphere is so light that it 
does not revolve quite as fast as the solid earth whirls 
within it. It hangs back a little. If (as is near the 
truth) a certain point on the equator — say the city of 
Quito, in Ecuador — is moving at the rate of a thou- 
sand miles an hour with the spinning of the globe on 
its axis, the atmosphere there only moves at the 
rate of 995 miles an hour. Of course, such a lagging 
back of the atmosphere must produce a steady wind 
in an opposite direction to the revolution of the earth, 

25 



26 OLD OCEAN. 

or from east to west, and at the rate of five miles an 
hour ; and such a wind actually does blow all the 
year round in the neighborhood of the equator. It is 
called the trade-wind ; and it has important influences 
beyond the cooling of the hot regions, or the fact that 
a ship may set its sails and ride before it for weeks 
without the trouble of moving a spar or losing a mo- 
ment's time. 

But before describing these influences upon the 
great currents of the ocean, let me call your attention 
to another matter — that of waves. 

This simple matter of waves has caused a deal of 
discussion among philosophic men who were trying to 
explain it. It has generally been said that in waves 
the water does not move along, but simply rises and 
falls. Complicated instruments have been made to 
show how this is, but you can illustrate it yourself by 
fastening a long strap at both ends, not drawing it 
very taut, and then giving one end a sudden jar; you 
will see a line of waves run the whole length of the 
strap, though certainly the leather does not move for- 
ward. But water is not confined at the ends, and it 
is only a very peculiar jarring disturbance in a con- 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 27 

fined space that causes water to toss up and down 
without any motion ahead. On the contrary, though, 
to a certain extent all waves are tremors which run 
across the surface faster than the heavy water can 
travel, and so a floating plank will seem to toss up 
and down in the same place while the waves go rush- 
ing under it, letting it rise and fall on their heaving 
ridges, yet the water in the waves goes forward all 
the time ; and it moves faster than the floating plank, 
because it is lighter and is more easily pushed along 
by the wind. Watch the sea or lake when a breeze 
is ruffling its face or a gale is crowding down upon it 
and urging it into violent disturbance. You see the 
long curving ridges of water coming swiftly on, one 
close behind the other, all marshalled in the same 
direction like long ranks of soldiers, and at a thou- 
sand points breaking into lines of hissing foam. Each 
of those ranks of angry green water under this gale 
from the north has a long rounded curve on its hinder 
slope, in the direction from which the gale comes, but 
its southern front is almost straight up and down — 
a wall of water, as sailors say of the huge waves of 
mid-ocean, which, when you are in front of them, 



28 OLD OCEAN. 

seem to tower overhead as though the whole mass 
would the next minute topple over upon the ship and 
you. Sometimes the crest, urged by the gale, does 
lose its balance and crash forward in that sparkling, 
resounding cataract which we call a "white cap." 
Surely this water is moving ahead — racing on like a 
frightened herd of white horses whose snowy manes 
of cold sharp spray dash fiercely in our faces as we 
sit on the open deck or stand at the end of the long 
pier. Such a tempest will drive the water upon the 
coast it beats against, until it raises the level of all the 
river-mouths, fills up all the bays, floods the salt 
marshes and throws the surf far beyond its ordinary 
mark. On the other hand, where a strong gale blows 
off a coast, it carries the water out until wide areas of 
rarely seen bottom are exposed along the shore. 

I conclude, then, that waves do not simply lift the 
water up and let it down again, but that they also 
bear it along with a speed proportionate to the power 
behind them. 

Now in the tropics, as I have said, the trade-wind 
blows steadily from east to west right around the 
earth without stopping. This gives it a tremendous 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 29 

space of water to pass over, nearly 10,000 miles in a 
stretch at one place across from South America to 
Australia. If one short breeze or gale can set the 
sea flowing strongly upon a certain coast, and even 
turn back the currents of large streams, then surely 
this strong and ceaseless trade-wind will set the 
water of the tropics flowing steadily in its own direc- 
tion from east to west. And it does do this ; but it is 
greatly helped by another agent of nature. 

The drops which make up a body of water are the 
most restless things in the world : they are always 
sliding down the least slope, sinking out of the way of 
lighter substances, rising to let a heavier object pass 
down beneath them, or moving hither and thither in 
endless search of that levelness and quiet which we 
call equilibrium. Furthermore, when water is heated 
it becomes lighter. If, therefore, a portion of the 
sea grows more warm than the rest, it will rise to the 
surface; and whenever a portion becomes cooled 
below the ordinary temperature it sinks. 

Now under the blazing sun of the torrid zone the 
surface-water of the sea gets very warm indeed and 
never has any chance to cool, while in the arctic and 



30 OLD OCEAN. 

antarctic regions the ocean is always chilled by perma- 
nent or floating ice until it is nearly cold enough to 
freeze ; but these masses of warm and cold water 
cannot remain separate in the one great ocean. The 
hot tropical flood continually rising must flow away 
somewhere to find its level, and it can flow nowhere 
except towards the poles, for there the ever-sinking 
volume of chilled and therefore heavier water sucks 
it in to take its place, while it, in turn, flows under- 
neath toward the equator, there to fill the gap which 
the escaping warm water leaves behind. So we know 
there is constantly going on an interchange of water 
— a constant flowing away from the equator northward 
and southward on the surface, and a flowing in towards 
the equator along the bottom ; an endless springing 
up in the torrid zone and a steady settling down of 
the polar seas. One out of many proofs of this fact 
is, that the mid-ocean abysses, five or ten or more 
miles deep, are known to be ice-cold. This could not 
happen unless they were constantly filled and refilled 
with new water from the great coolers at the poles ; 
for if the water at those depths should remain 
unchanged it would quickly become very warm 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 



3* 



from the heat of the interior of the earth. 

But while this invisible vertical circulation is going 
on, another more visible and interesting set of move- 
ments is in progress on the surface, forming what are 
known as ocean currents. These are vast rivers in the 
ocean flowing across its face in certain directions 
and to a certain depth, as rivers make their way along 
the land. They begin and are kept going by a union 
of the two causes already explained — heat and wind. 

The heat of the sun at the equator warming, light- 
ening and evaporating the water, constantly tends to 
draw the colder water from the poles, and particularly 
from the great antarctic sea. The cold water, has- 
tening to the equator, is soon interrupted by the ex- 
tremities of Australia, Africa and South America, and 
so split into three great branches. That which passes 
into the South Atlantic goes on northward along the 
western coast of Africa, getting so warm under the 
hot sun of these low latitudes that it will not sink, as 
has the great mass of the water which first left with 
it the ice-zone, but comes more and more to the sur- 
face, until it strikes against the great shoulder of 
Guinea and is turned sharply westward. Now it is 



32 OLD OCEAN. 

squarely under the trade-wind and headed the same 
way ; constantly urged forward by this moderate but 
endless tugging of the wind upon its waves, the cur- 
rent can never swerve, and flows along the equator, 
and for half a dozen degrees each side of it, straight 
across the Atlantic. South America, however stands 
in its path, and the wedge-like coast of Brazil, pointed 
with Cape St. Roque, splits this great river. Part of 
it now turns southward and swings back across 
towards Africa, making an eddy a couple of thousand 
miles wide in the South Atlantic, and another arm 
runs down the Patagonian coast. But by far the 
largest part of the divided current is sent northward, 
past the Amazon and the Orinoco and all that low 
steaming coast of upper Brazil, in through the mazes 
of the Antilles, to the pocket of the Carribean Sea, 
and thence struggles out between the larger islands 
of the West Indies into the North Atlantic. It used 
to be thought that out of the Carribean Sea all this 
moving flood poured into the Gulf of Mexico, and 
thence out ; but now it is known that the trough be- 
tween Yucatan and Cuba is not deep enough to give 
it passage, nor, if it were, is the pass between Florida 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 33 

and Cuba large enough to let it out. Nevertheless it 
keeps the old name, and, I suspect, will always be 
known as the Gulf Stream. 

When it has worried through the islands and 
has once more gathered its full force together, 
the Gulf Stream flows northward close along the coast 
of our Southern States until Cape Hatteras gives it 
a swerve away, when it strikes out to sea and pushes 
straight across to Spain, where a branch leaves it and 
runs northward between Iceland and the British 
Islands, while the main body turns southward to min- 
gle again with the equatorial current from Africa and 
repeat its journey all over again. It is in the heart of 
this great circle of currents in the middle of the At- 
lantic that navigators find that dreaded region of heat 
and calms which they call the Doldrums ; and here, 
too, float round and round the wide, buoyant meadows 
of the Sargasso Sea. 

Meanwhile another most important cold stream is 
making its way through the Atlantic, known as the 
Arctic current. It comes down out of Baffin's Bay, 
joins a similar flood from the outer coast of Greenland, 
is thrown up to the surface by the Banks of New- 



34 °LD OCEAN. 

foundland, and meeting with the warm air, produces 
those thick and prolonged fogs so common in that 
region, fills Massachusetts Bay with chilly water, and 
finally, meeting the Gulf Stream off the Virginia 
coast, dips under it amid that commotion of waters 
which makes Cape Hatteras a centre of storms. 

The Pacific has a very similar arrangement of cur- 
rents. The trade-wind drives westward the waters 
from the western coast of South America, pouring a 
branch down between New Guinea and Borneo, while 
a larger branch bends northward along the coast of 
Siberia, swings across to the coast of Alaska, and then 
on down to California, where it is gradually swerved 
westward on its old equatorial track. This is a warm 
river like the Gulf Stream, and is usually called the 
great Japan current. But down through Behring's 
Strait, which is too shallow to admit a large one, 
comes a small cold stream, which answers to the 
Arctic current of the other side. 

In a lesser way, the Indian Ocean has a strong 
stream flowing directly across from Australia to South 
Africa. It is of immense help to the ships returning 
from China and the East Indies. There are also 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 37 

various minor currents, like that one south of Austra- 
lia, and the one that forms a great eddy in the Ara- 
bian Sea. You will find all of them marked on a 
map in most geographies, and will understand me 
better after you have looked them up. 

Not all are as well marked as the Gulf Stream. Its 
brightly blue water is in such contrast to the darker, 
greenish hue of the remainder of the ocean that 
sailors can often tell when they enter the edge of the 
current, half their vessel being in and half out of the 
stream. If you approach from the east you find that 
the water at first shows only a warmth of fifty or 
sixty degrees near the surface ; but as you sail on, 
this gets higher, until, opposite Sandy Hook, you may 
get as high a reading on the thermometer as 80 de- 
grees, and opposite Florida above one hundred 
degrees. This difference in temperature between the 
eastern and western margins of the Gulf Stream is 
owing to the presence of the great river of arctic 
water flowing in an opposite direction between the 
Gulf Stream and the shore. Off Florida the Gulf 
Stream is about sixty miles wide ; off New York it is 
over one hundred miles in width, but is less sharply 



38 OLD OCEAN. 

defined. Its depth is hard to determine, but it cer- 
tainly amounts to several hundred feet. It is worth 
remembering that, although some guesses had been 
made at it before, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was the 
first man really to study the Gulf Stream and tell us 
anything of its origin and course. 

These ocean currents have a great influence upon 
the climate of both the land and the seas, and affect 
the inhabitants of both in various ways. The study 
of this influence brings out some entertaining facts. 
For example, the North Atlantic is the stormiest of 
all oceans, because the Gulf Stream heats portions 
of the atmosphere and thus sets winds a-blowing. 

Scotland lies as far north as Labrador, and the lat- 
itude of London is above that of Lake Superior. Yet 
they have none of the terrible frosts and heavy snows 
which prevail in Canada and make Labrador a land 
of ice almost uninhabitable. This difference is due 
almost entirely to the fact that the Gulf Stream pours 
its warm flood against the coast of Great Britain, and 
even tempers the Norwegian coast, so that forests 
grow and the Laps can live in much comfort on a 
line with the endless glaciers and frozen seas of 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 



39 



Greenland. But instead of having all the sea-breezes 
warmed by flowing over water that brings with it the 
heat of its long wanderings under the fierce equa- 
tor, the unfortunate coasts of Greenland are bathed 




OCEAN CURRENTS AND TRADE-WINDS. 

in water chilled by months of captivity near the pole, 
and loaded with ice which cools down all the winds 
that blow ashore till they freeze everything they 
touch for half the year, and make it foggy or chilly 
the rest of the time. Hence Boston is a city of frost 
and snow all winter, when it is really no further 
north than sunny, flower-growing Italy, where one 
laughs at winter. 

Similarly, in the Pacific Ocean, the northward move- 



4-0 OLD OCEAN. 

ment of the great Japanese current makes the coast 
of China habitable and pleasant clear to the sea of 
Okotzk, and gives the Aleutian Archipelago a pretty 
decent climate ; but by the time the current has had 
a touch of Behring's Strait and swept down the 
shores of British America, it has got well rid of its 
warmth, and gives to the Pacific coast of the United 
States that constant succession of chill winds and 
fogs and the heavy rains or snows which mar the 
climate of California. The weather in the interior of 
continents is pretty much alike on similar latitudes 
the world round, varying with height ; but the cli- 
mate of all sea-coasts is good or bad as a place to 
live, in accordance with the temperature of the water 
which the currents bring to that part of the ocean. 

But the currents of the ocean influence something 
besides the weather. Upon them depends to a con- 
siderable extent whether a certain part of the coast 
shall have one or another kind of animals dwelling 
in the salt water. This is not so much true of fishes 
as it is of the mollusks or * shell-fish," the worms 
that live in the mud of the ~tide-flats, the anemones, 
sea-urchins, starfish and little clinging people of the 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 4 1 

wet rocks, and the jelly-fishes, great and small, that 
swim about in the open sea. 

Nothing would injure most of these "small fry" 
more than a change in the water making it a few de- 
grees colder or warmer than they were accustomed 
to. Since the constant circulation of the currents 
keeps the ocean water in all its parts almost precisely 
of the same density, and food seems about as likely 
to abound in one district as another, naturalists have 
concluded that it is temperature which decides the 
extent of coast or of sea-area where any one kind of 
invertebrate animal will be found ; for beyond, the 
too great heat, or else the chill of the water, sets a 
wall as impassable as if of rock. It thus happens 
that the small life of hot Cuban waters is different 
from that of our Carolina coast ; and that, again, 
largely separate from what you will see off New 
York ; while Cape Cod seems to run out as a parti- 
tion between the shore-life south of it, and a very 
different set of shells, sand-worms, and so forth, to 
the northward. This is not strictly denned ; many 
species lap over, and a few are to be found the whole 
length of our coast ; yet Cape Hatteras ends the 



42 OLD OCEAN. 

northern range of many half-tropical species, and 
Cape Cod will not let pass it dozens of kinds of ani- 
mals abundant from Massachusetts Bay northward. 

But out in the ocean, the warm current of the Gulf 
Stream forms a genial pathway along which southern 
swimming animals — like the wondrously beautiful 
Portuguese man-o'-war — 'may wander northward for 
hundreds of miles beyond where they are found near 
shore ; but if by chance they stray outside the limits 
of the warm Gulf Stream they will at once be chilled 
to death. Similarly the arctic currents let arctic ani- 
mals, used to half-freezing water, make their way as 
far south as Massachusetts Bay. 

There is another thing of interest about ocean cur- 
rents. They not only allow swimming animals to go 
beyond their ordinary range by supplying them with 
water of the right temperature, but they carry floating 
burdens where they are greatly needed. They bring 
the icebergs — though perhaps these are not among 
the things" needed, since' they help to form those 
terrible fogs of Alaska and Newfoundland ; and they 
often bear the great logs which come floating down the 
Amazon or our own rivers clear across to the shores 



WAVES AND CURRENTS. 43 

of Europe. Before the western half of the world 
had been discovered to Southern Europe by Colum- 
bus, these water-soaked, weed-grown, barnacle-flecked 
trunks of unknown trees used to puzzle men over there 
greatly; and the conviction gradually forced itself 
upon their minds that there must be an unseen coun- 
try far away to the west where these trees grew. Thus 
the Atlantic currents bore messages from the mysteri- 
ous new world which finally were heeded by brave ex- 
plorers. They gave a hint of the way to America just as 
the buffalo-trails first taught the engineers the best 
routes of our Pacific railways across the Rocky 
Mountains. 

The currents do another service to the world. 
Where they strike islands not far from some conti- 
nent or some other islands, they often carry along 
old logs with plants growing upon them and quanti- 
ties of seeds which are not injured by their short 
voyages. When, therefore, the coral polyps build up 
one of their reef-islands until it appears above the 
waves, thither the currents bring roots and seeds 
from neighboring islands, and quickly plant them 
upon the new barren shores, so that in a few seasons 



44 OLD OCEAN. 

the little islet becomes green and wooded and ready- 
to hold its own against the winds and waves. 

Moreover, the same drifting stuff will carry many 
sorts of land animals, — insects, snails of many kinds, 
reptiles, and even four-footed beasts, and so not only 
give the island a vegetation, but populate it with 
many of its smaller animals. This seems to you, 
perhaps, a very accidental and haphazard way of fit- 
ting out an island so that presently it may support 
human beings, nor is it the only means by which 
barren islands become productive ; but it is important 
as far as it goes ; and when we study into the distri- 
bution of plants and animals in an archipelago, we 
are pretty sure to find those of the same sort upon 
islands that lie in the same current. 



III.— EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH 
POLE. 

T SUPPOSE that by the discovery of how to get 
-*• a fire, the first savage men were able to make 
the longest of all the steps toward civilization. Next 
to this, the tilling of the soil has been of most 
advantage ; but surely the third means of growth out 
of barbarism has been the knowledge of navigation. 
As we have no history of a time when men did not 
possess a fire, so we cannot go back to where they 
did not have boats. Yet it is easy to return to an 
age when all use of boats was confined to inland 
waters, or to ocean coasts where headlands were 
always in sight as landmarks. As wars and trade 
called for larger enterprises, and knowledge grew, the 
boatmen became more venturesome, until, finally, a 
wonderful invention enabled sailors to leave the land 

45 



46 OLD OCEAN. 

behind, and become real mariners, pursuing a steadily- 
straight course for weeks together across the untracked 
sea. 

How well the early Chinese knew the oriental 
seas, and that the Polynesians could steer from 
island to island for thousands of miles, we can 
only guess; for the first seafaring people of whom 
we have any accurate history are the Phoenicians, 
who were at the head of the world about 500 years 
B. C. Their capital city was Tyre, on the Syrian 
coast; and when we first hear of them, their ships 
traded east and west from England to India. As 
long ago as 600 years B. C, Necho, a wise king of 
Egypt, employed Phoenician sailors to explore the 
eastern coast of Africa, and they started down the 
Red sea. Two years later they came sailing into 
the Mediterranean through the straits of Gibraltar, 
showing that they had rounded the Cape of Good 
Hope. A century or so later the princes of the 
second great Phoenician city, Carthage (now Tunis), 
sent Hamio, with sixty ships, to explore the Atlantic 
coast of Africa; but he seems to have got only 
about as far as Sierra Leone. Then in 320 B. C, an 



EARLY VOYAGES. AND THE SOUTH POLE. 47 

expedition from Massilia (where Marseilles in France 
now stands) set out northward under another Cartha- 
ginian captain, Pytheas. It sailed along the coasts 
of Spain and France, clear around Great Britain, and 
back home, and is famous for its discovery of Ultima 
Thule (now generally thought to be Shetland, or else 
a part of Norway), then considered the northern 
extremity of the earth. The next year Pytheas 
penetrated the Baltic. 

Meanwhile, exploration in the east had been 
pushed by the conquests of Alexander the Great, 
but chiefly on land, so that all the coasts beyond, 
nearer India, remained unknown for hundreds of 
years later; though the fact that the earth was a 
globe was understood two centuries before Christ; 
and the first geographer, Eratosthenes, suggested 
that by sailing westward new continents and islands 
might be discovered beyond the "utmost purple rim" 
of the Atlantic. This is about all that the famous 
Ptolemy knew in the second century after Christ. 

The conquests of Rome, Constantinople, and the 
Mohammedans, extended a knowledge of Asia; but 
in Europe more than six hundred years went by after 



48 OLD OCEAN. 

Ptolemy, before any progress was made. This was 
that dark time called the Middle Ages, which fol- 
lowed the weakening and breaking up of the Roman 
empire. The first signs of its brightening came 
from Gothland, on the cold shores of the North sea, 
where the Norman Vikings ruled, not only the most 
enterprising and refined race in western Europe, but 
all-powerful on the sea. Dreaded as these rough 
old Norman sea-kings were, they were not wholly 
pirates and marauders ; and from them the proudest 
Englishmen and Americans trace their descent. 
Well, these Normans, with their friends the Norse- 
men, braving the icy terrors of the wild seas in their 
small ships, by the middle of the ninth century had 
sailed past North Cape, and all along the coast of 
Lapland, knew all about Scotland and the Scottish 
Isles, had discovered the Faroe Islands (A. D. 86 1) 
and settled them, and in 874 planted colonies in 
Iceland. Thence old Red Eric — who has atoned 
for his crimes by his valor — bore away westward, 
until the bleak cliffs of Greenland loomed before 
him, and landed upon the continent of America 
five hundred years before Columbus started from 



EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 49 

Cartegena. The colonies thus established in Green- 
land not only kept up communication with Iceland 
and Europe, but made new explorations for them- 
selves. They sailed around into Baffin's bay, going 
well towards its northern extremity; and before the 
year iooo, Byorni, a son of one of old Red Eric's 
comrades, led an expedition southward past Labrador, 
around Nova Scotia, and away south of Cape Cod to 
a pleasant district called Vinland, where a Norse 
village existed for many years. Just where this was 
situated we don't know, but it is thought that the old 
tower at Newport, Rhode Island, is a relic of those 
early days. Very soon after, fishermen began coming 
from Norway, Jutland (Denmark), and the Briton 
coast of France, to the banks of Newfoundland; 
and it is a curious fact, that the Indian name in 
Newfoundland for the cod is not an Indian word at 
all, but a corrupted French word. 

For five hundred years these Norman colonies 
flourished, and the Newfoundland banks were annu- 
ally fished upon by Europeans, who found their way 
back and forth by the help of the stars, I suppose. 
But toward the end of the fourteenth century catas- 



5° 



OLD OCEAN. 



trophe came. Fleeing from destruction, a Tartan 
chief with a few followers marched to Kamtchatka, 
crossed Behring's straits after much fighting, col- 
lected an army of Arctic Indians, and made his way 
clear across from Alaska to Labrador, where he ar- 
rived in 1399. There he heard of the Norman towns 
in southern Greenland, rich in things he needed. 
Not minding the wrong of it, he built boats enough 
to carry a crowd of his savages across, attacked the 
villages then feeble with the devastation of a plague, 
killed all the people and left the towns in ruins. This 
was the end of all colonies in Greenland ; for just 
then their people at home were too busy in conquer- 
ing England and fighting the Gauls to think of Amer- 
ica, and the far western shore was forgotten by all 
but a few students. 

But about this time the world was waking from its 
long stupidity. Commerce was reviving, learning 
began to flourish, and kings were willing to let their 
subjects plan and carry out naval enterprises. Just 
in this ripe time came the help which enabled naviga- 
tion to take the greatest step forward it ever did or 
ever will take. It appears that while the western 



EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 5 1 

world was under the cloud of the Dark Ages, the 
Chinese discovered — no one knows just how or 
where — that a bit of iron properly magnetized will 
invariably turn so as to point toward the north, no 
matter in what part of the world the test is made. 
Europe learned of this astonishing invention first at 
Naples about 1307, and the value of it was seen at 
once, for it gave the sailor a sure indication of where 
north lay when he was out of sight of land and all 
the stars were hidden in storm-clouds. Knowing 
where north was, he could easily find east or west ; 
but to aid him, these, and three hundred and sixty in- 
termediate points called "degrees," were marked in 
a circle on a small sheet of paper, over which the 
magnetized needle was so fixed as to swing freely ; 
and this arrangement, so simple yet accomplishing so 
much, made the mariner's compass. 

At this time nearly all the commerce of Europe 
was with India and China. The overland route was 
long, expensive and dangerous. The water route was 
equally so, for vessels had to stick close to land, and 
thus were often on a perilous lea shore. The first 
need of the world was the discovery of some straighter 



52 OLD OCEAN. 

and quicker road to the east. But upon this errand, 
Venice took the lead, and sent Zeni to the westward 
as early as 1380, but he could not get past North 
America, and so returned. Then Portugal came for- 
ward under the brilliant leadership of Prince Henry 
the Navigator, who, by the way, was half an English- 
man, since his mother was Philippa of Lancaster. It 
was Prince Henry's ambition to find the sea-path to 
the east, and he enlisted the help of the best naviga- 
tors of every country. Thus urged, Portugal's ships 
sailed further and further southward, seeking to get 
by Africa, until in i486 Dias fought his way through 
the storms that guarded the Cape of Good Hope, 
and opened the route for Vasco de Gama to push 
straight across the Indian ocean to Calcutta in 1497. 
The sea-path to India was found at last, and the 
extension of commerce to China and the great eastern 
islands quickly followed ; but poor Prince Henry was 
dead long before. 

Portugal was so much occupied with these and other 
ocean surveys, and in governing her new eastern pos- 
sessions, that she would not listen to the plans of an 
ambitious young sailor from Genoa named Christo- 



EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 53 

pher Columbus. He had been reading all the trav- 
els he could get hold of, and diligently studying all 
that was known of geography and navigation. He had 
heard of the voyages of the Vikings to Greenland and 
Vinland, of the fishing trips to Newfoundland and of 
the researches of Zeni. He had faith in them, and 
thought if he went further south he might either get 
past Vinland and sail straight on to China and eastern 
India or else he would come upon an unknown conti- 
nent. Either of these results would be glorious. But 
it was long before he could get any government to 
support the attempt. How, finally, he persuaded 
Spain to fit out his small ships ; how bravely he kept 
on his way across the rough Atlantic with instruments 
which now we should think utterly worthless, since 
the quadrant and sextant were then unknown ; how, 
in 1492, the Bahamas were reached ; and how in sub- 
sequent voyages more and more of the West Indies 
were surveyed, until in 1498 he set foot upon the 
mainland of South America — are already familiar to 
you. 

Europe was quick to profit by the discovery of the 
western continent, and sent scores of expeditions to 



54 OLD OCEAN. 

take possession of anything not yet claimed by Spain ; 
but the Spaniards kept in the lead, and rapidly ex- 
plored not only the Brazilian coast, but crossed over 
and set their standards in the surf of the Pacific. 
Thence they extended their expeditions from Panama 
northward as far as Vancouver's Island, and south- 
ward to Chili. 

All this time the Dutch and Portuguese were busy 
exploring the region about Spitzbergen and in the 
White sea, and possessing themselves of the East 
Indies, while the English and French sent voyagers 
to the rediscovered shores of what is now Canada and 
New England, until within a very few years from Col- 
umbus' voyage the whole Atlantic and much of the 
Pacific coast of both Americas was fairly well known. 

Of all these expeditions, however, the most bril- 
liant was that of Magellan, a native of Portugal, who 
commanded an expedition of three ships for the king 
of Spain. Steering straight for Brazil, he worked his 
way southward to see where the end of the continent 
was, and finally entered a gulf, the southern shore of 
which he called Terra del Fuego, because he saw so 
many fires there. Sailing into this gulf, he was de- 



EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 55 

lighted presently to emerge into a new ocean on the 
other side. Shaping his course northwest, at the end 
of three long months Magellan reached the East 
Indies, and knew that he had been around the world 
for the first time in history. 

Following him with an expedition in 1577, Sir 
Francis Drake of England was driven by a storm west 
of Terra del Fuego to its southern point, and so dis- 
covered that the Atlantic and Pacific were joined 
there. Then he sailed northward, entered the har- 
bor where San Francisco now stands, and then 
crossed the Pacific, homeward bound. Thirty-eight 
years later Cape Horn was rounded for the first time 
by the Dutch Captain Van Schonter, who named it 
after his native town in Holland. Meanwhile the 
same nation had caught sight of Australia, and in 
1642 Captain Abel Jansen Tasman left Batavia on a 
voyage southward, which was destined to prove very 
important indeed, for it added to the map Southern 
Australia, Van Diemen's land, New Zealand, and 
much information concerning New Guinea and many 
small islands. Beyond this, the voyages of the fa- 
mous English Captain Cook taught us most about 



56 OLD OCEAN. 

the south seas where Cook finally lost his life. 

During this time accident more than design had 
contributed some knowledge of the ocean about the 
south pole, although steady explorations were being 
conducted in the Arctic seas, to which I shall devote 
the whole of my next chapter. 

More than two hundred and eighty years ago the 
existence of islands far to the southward of any con- 
tinents became known to navigators, who were driven 
thither by bad weather, and little by little was added 
to the map of this desolate region ; but it was not 
until 1774 that any one went into that terrible Ant- 
arctic sea for the express purpose of a survey. This 
man was the intrepid Captain Cook, and though he 
went a third of the way around the globe in his efforts 
to find an entrance through the icy barrier, he could 
never penetrate beyond 71° south latitude, only about 
equal to North Cape, or the town of Upernavik, in 
the Arctic region. Later captains did little better, 
until 1841, when Ross, in his ships " Erebus " and 
"Terror," skirted the edge of the thick ice that every- 
where clothed the land, though it was midsummer, 
and finally reached the base of the southernmost 



EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 59 

land yet known on the globe — a magnificent moun- 
tain chain stretching away to the south from latitude 
77 5 X . Some years before this, Captain Parry, an 
Arctic explorer, gave the name of "Ross" to the 
most northerly land then known ; this southward 
end of the world Ross now called "Parry Land," 
and so returned a compliment in a way it is not often 
possible for men to do. 

The most conspicuous point of all this range of 
polar mountains was a lofty volcano — Ml. Erebus — 
12,400 feet high, and covered with everlasting glaciers 
and snow from its lonely crest to the tempestuous 
water's edge. It was in active eruption, and Ross 
tries to tell of the splendor of its action when the wide, 
glistening waste of snow and the deep blue of the 
ocean were lighted by the column of fire and smoke 
hurled thousands of feet skyward from its crater; 
but who can picture the grandeur of such a scene ! 

Meagre as this information is, it is about all we 
know of the globe within the Antarctic circle, and 
we are likely never to learn much more. In a lati- 
tude much further from the pole than where, in the 
north, vegetation is abundant, and men and animals 



60 OLD OCEAN. 

live all the year round, the severity of the Antarctic 
climate cuts off all life, and constantly seals the 
water under a cap of ice. The only land appears to 
be volcanic ; and the soil, or, rather, the structure of 
the islands, is often found to consist of nothing but 
alternate layers of ashes and ice, that have suc- 
ceeded one another season after season. Most of 
the coast is unapproachable on account of an 
unbroken belt of cliffs of perpetual ice ; and it is 
only in the outermost islands that even coarse grass, 
a few lichens, or simple seaweeds can be found ; for 
the volcanic heights within are utterly destitute of 
any vegetation whatever, and the highest noonday 
heat of summer is only a little above the freezing- 
point. 

Why this intense cold and dreadful desolation 
exists so much further from the pole in the southern 
than in the northern hemisphere, I need hardly 
explain to you ; for you will recall that in the north 
the continents are so broad as to form almost an 
unbroken wall about the narrow polar sea, confining 
its cold waters, warming the air by wide radiation, 
and guiding the heated flood of the Gulf Stream 



EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 6 1 

straight into the chilling northern sea. In the 
Antarctic region, on the other hand, an immense 
breadth of water is broken by no land of any 
account ; there is and can be no great warm current 
to temper the sea-water, and along hundreds of miles 
of glacial cliffs icebergs are daily breaking off and 
drifting far northward to chill both water and air 
beyond the limit of animal endurance. Terra del 
Fuego stands as a type of all that is cold and 
desolate, yet it is no nearer to its pole than the 
Highlands of Scotland are to the northern "hub," 
and considerably more distant than the great city 
of St. Petersburg, the capital of "all the Russias." 

Of course, then, you would not expect land- 
animals to be found in this vast ice! and capping 
the southern axis of the globe ; yet of sea mammals 
there is a large variety, including several whales, 
dolphins and their kin, and various sorts of seals, 
small and large — notably the huge sea-elephant, now 
becoming very rare. All these feed on fishes, which 
are abundant there, as also are the humbler orders 
of animal life. Then, too, the Antarctic islands are 
the resort of enormous flocks of sea-birds : ducks, 



62 OLD OCEAN. 

albatrosses, penguins, petrels, etc., all different from 
the arctic species. Some of these birds are giants 
of their kind, as, for instance, the great "break- 
bones " petrel, whose powerful beak is four and one- 
half inches long. It ordinarily lives on fishes or on 
floating carrion, but now and then it attacks living 
birds, even those as large as a loon, killing them by- 
repeated blows on the head. Feeble mates of its 
own species, even, are thus struck down and torn 
to pieces. As for the albatross, it is only rivalled by 
the condor in size and strength ; while the big, 
stupid penguins seem far more fishy than bird-like, 
scarcely ever visiting the land except to lay their 
*-ggs and hatch their young. 



IV.— THE POLAR REGIONS. 

EVER since the sea-route from Europe to India 
and China was settled and the coast of South 
America explored, the regions within the Arctic circle 
have been the favorite field of discovery. It occurred 
to every navigator that as a way was found past the 
southern end of the American continent, so one 
around its northern border might be disclosed; and 
perhaps, also, a ship-route along the northern coast of 
Siberia and down through Behring's straits. Both of 
these would be far shorter than going around Cape 
Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. Thus captain 
after captain headed expeditions of research, from 
Barentzoon in 1596, to Mackenzie in 1789, until, at 
the beginning of the present century, the mainland 
coasts of both continents surrounding the north pole 
were well known. If you look at a map of the polar 
63 



64 OLD OCEAN. 

world you see that these coasts form a fairly good 
circle of land, broken only by the Atlantic ; and also 
that all points on this coast-line are nearly at equal 
distance from the pole, except at the northeastern 
corner of America, where a dense group of islands 
extends northward. Within this great circle is an 
unknown region about one thousand miles wide in its 
narrowest part, and covered with almost endless ice 
and snow. Whether it be all a frozen sea, or 
partially open water, or an archipelago of glacier- 
capped islands, or a mass of land, no one knows. 

What hardships the men of artic expeditions have 
undergone, and the splendid courage they have shown, 
cannot be told here. You can read it in their own 
words, and gaze at their own hurried sketches. I 
know no more thrilling tales than these narratives of 
Beechy, Sconsby, Ross, Parry, Kane, Hayes, Hall, 
Markham, Young, and the " Polaris " party. And 
there are many keenly enjoyable arctic books in 
French, German and Swedish, for none of these 
nations have been behind us. 

Well, it having been found that the dream of a 
" northwest passage " to China must be abandoned, 



THE POLAR REGIONS. 65 

and that, although Professor Nordonskjold carried 
his steamer through the Siberian sea from Copen- 
hagen to Yokohama, yet this route was not really 
useful to merchants — what has been accomplished 
by three hundred years of steady and intelligent 
cruising in the frigid zone ? 

Looking first at the mainlands, we notice that they 
are much alike all the way round. Back from the 
coast lie low, level plains, forming the "barren 
grounds" of America and the "tundras" of the old 
world. These plains remain treeless, because swept 
during the greater part of the year by fearfully cold 
and fierce winds ; but they are overspread with 
mosses and lichens so dense as to form peat-beds in 
damp spots. This dreary monotony is relieved in 
sheltered places by scanty grasses and a few flowers. 
Portions of this area, particularly along the lower parts 
of the great Russian rivers, are morasses with islands 
of half-firm ground to break their wide watery soli- 
tude. 

In America these plains extend as far south as 
Labrador. West of Hudson's bay, however, the 
forests grow much further to the north, and continue 



66 OLD OCEAN. " 

to encroach upon the barrens until, towards the mouth 
of the Mackenzie, they reach as high as latitude 71 , 
after which they fall away again to the Alaskan 
coast. The same irregular boundary between the 
forests and the tundras exists in Russia, the woods 
growing nearest to the coast along the Lena river, 
and furthest from it west of the Yenesei and in 
Kamtchatka. These forests are all evergreen trees 
(chiefly firs), and of diminutive size, even when of 
great age, because the short summers permit only a 
trifling growth. 

To these desolate marshes in summer come from 
the south hosts of water-birds to make their nests, 
followed by hawks and owls intent upon rearing their 
own young, and preying upon their weaker fellows. 
Various small animals — hares, mice, lemmings, etc. 
— live there; the musk-ox and reindeer leave the 
insect-plagued woods to graze upon the reindeer 
moss, and the fox, lynx and bear range along the 
forest edges. But in winter nearly all signs of life 
have disappeared, and limitless fields of snow closely 
blanket lakes, rivers and grassy plains alike. 

In the summer months, too, barbarous people 



THE POLAR REGIONS. 67 

wander over these barrens — in Russia the Laps, the 
Samoyeds, the Tchooctchi, and others — and in 
America the Innuit and other Indians and the Eski- 
mos; but in winter they all retreat into the forests, 
or else set up their warm huts on the sea-shore. 

It has been said that the continuance of our world 
as a suitable place for us to live, depends on these 
vast tundas remaining low and flat as they are now. 
If there were mountains or even hills instead of 
plains, lofty cliffs in place of marshy shores, the 
elevation would make them so cold that the snows of 
winter would never melt, but harden into ice every 
summer, as happens on. a small scale in the Swiss 
mountains. This would go on increasing over so 
wide an extent, that finally the weight of accumulated 
ice would disturb the balance of the world, and the 
result would be the destruction of animal life. As it 
is, we need not fear any such catastrophe. 

In the Arctic seas the perils of navigation are 
doubled. In addition to the storms and mishaps of 
ordinary voyages, the seaman must here thread his 
way through narrow channels whose depth is imper- 
fectly known, will often find himself wrapped in 



68 OLD OCEAN. 

dense fogs or blinding snow-storms, must watch lest 
he be crushed in ice that is drifting, or dashed to 
pieces against ice that is firm. 

Sailing northward in summer, navigators first begin 
to meet with great floating masses, called bergs, on 
a line between Ireland and Newfoundland; though 
occasionally bergs drift almost down to Nova Scotia. 
Next they come to drift-ice — fragments large and 
small moving in fields, loose enough to let a ship 
make its way through. Beyond this is seen the 
pack-ice; that is, broken ice so firmly packed to- 
gether that it cannot be penetrated ; and if this is of 
great extent, or is a solid portion broken off the main 
field that has covered the whole sea or bay, it is 
spoken of as a floe. 

The position where hard pack-ice is pretty sure to 
be met with is now well known to the whaling and 
sealing vessels, and the exploring ships that annu- 
ally go into northern waters. It stands as a barrier 
hundreds of miles wide along eastern Greenland, ex- 
tends from the southern point of Spitzbergen east- 
ward almost to Nova Zembla (which has an ice-field 
of its own on the eastern shore), then stretches 



THE POLAR REGIONS. 69 

across to Taimyr gulf. Thence only a narrow space 
of open water is ever to be found — and that not 
surely — between the solid ice and the mainland away 
eastward along Siberia, across Behrirjg's straits, and on 
beyond Alaska to the mouth of the Mackenzie river. 
There the great number of islands make the region 
so warm, by soaking sunshine into the land, as it 
were, and storing it up to be let out gradually through 
the winter, that a good deal of open water is seen dur- 
ing the warm half of the year, extending far to the 
northwest of Greenland. In the Atlantic, the fading 
warmth of the last end of the Gulf Stream is sufficient 
to keep the western shores of Spitzbergen pretty free 
from summer ice, and enables plants to grow and 
some animals to live on those far Arctic islands. 

It is for this reason that the most nearly successful 
of the attempts to reach the north pole have been 
those by the way of Greenland or else past Spitzbergen. 
These attempts have been many ; and though while I 
am writing, news comes of the wrecking of the 
Jeannette north of Siberia, word is also brought 
that a new ship of Arctic research is to be prepared 
in New York. It seems as though men would never 



70 OLD OCEAN. 

stop till they had sailed over the very end of the 
earth, and been able to write in their log-books, " no 
longitude, no latitude." 

Do you ask, " What is the use of that, when it is 
so difficult and dangerous and expensive ? " Well, 
we have learned that there is no commercial gain to 
be got, no people to be benefited ; and we should 
probably discover little more than we now know of 
the geology and the scanty plants and animals of the 
unexplored regions. Astronomers say they should be 
glad to have certain scientific experiments made right 
at the pole to match with those made elsewhere in 
the world; but I fear the search has come to be 
chiefly a matter of pride. Every man who tries, 
knows that if he succeeds his name will be spoken 
with glory all over the world, and each nation is 
anxious that its citizens should be able to claim this 
grand praise. So brave sailors and scientific men 
will still risk their lives to go, and governments will 
gladly furnish them with ships. 

To go on a polar exploration, a ship has to be made 
doubly strong by every kind of extra planking and 
bracing. None but steam vessels are sent nowa- 



THE POLAR REGIONS. 7 1 

days, and they are usually accompanied by a second 
vessel which goes with them to Disco, or some other 
Danish settlement in Greenland, and carries an extra 
supply of coal and other things, so that they may 
start with full bins on the very edge of their field of 
work. After that they use their sails as much as pos- 
sible, instead of steam, and so economize their coal. 
At the settlements of the Greenlanders they take on 
board fur-clothing, sledges and Eskimo dogs, and 
perhaps an Eskimo family as interpreters, with dried 
seal and walrus meat to feed the dogs. Years ago, 
canned meats and other provisions were not known, and * 
a two years' trip of this kind was a long period of half 
starvation and sickness; but now very good food is 
taken in compact form, and there is always a skilful 
surgeon in the party. Indeed, it was only a few 
years ago that Lord Dufrerin went to Arctic regions 
in his steam yacht as a pleasure trip ! 

It is summer when they start, and generally they 
can pick their way through loose ice beyond the 
upper end of Baffin's bay. After this begin great 
perils as they push northward. The channels be- 
tween the many islands are narrow and tortuous, and 



72 OLD OCEAN. 

through them come drifting enormous bergs, towering 
hundreds of feet over the mast-head, and often pitch- 
ing over. It is often almost impossible to avoid 
them, or the shore ice, because these island channels 
cause the tides to form swift and changeable currents 
which give the pilots great difficulty in steering. 
Sometimes it happens that two currents will oppose 
one another side by side, so as to bring two huge 
bergs together, and the ship must work hard to keep 
from being between when the collision comes. Then 
there are the packs to be studied, which is the busi- 
ness of a single experienced officer called an ice- 
pilot. The currents play havoc with these packs too. 
One freak is to set them spinning. Let two great 
whirling packs, each five hundred or a thousand 
acres in extent, strike one another, and you can im- 
agine what a crashing and grinding there will be. 
The strongest ship would amount to nothing more 
there than a peanut-shell under a trip-hammer. 

Often ice will bar a whole channel, and from the 
mast-head can be seen nothing else ahead. Then the 
ship must be moored to its edge and drift with the 
floe, watching it carefully to see that something dan- 



THE POLAR REGIONS. 73 

gerous does not occur, until a crack opens and one 
can sail in. Perhaps after a few hundred yards of 
cautious progress this crack will close up, and then 
there is great danger lest the ship shall be cut in two 
by the pinching edges of the re-united floe, or held a 
prisoner and drift helplessly southward until the 
whole season is wasted. 

These and a score of other perils avoided — and in 
some seasons no one can make any headway, while 
in other years progress is comparatively easy — the 
explorer finds himself at the end of the summer as 
far north as he is able to get, and either hastens 
back or goes into winter-quarters. Generally the 
latter plan is adopted, and a good harbor chosen ; but 
sometimes the ship is obliged to winter wherever it 
happens to be. 

The spot having been chosen, several anchors are 
set very firmly, all the "running rigging" is taken 
down, a wooden house, which has been brought in 
pieces, is fitted together over the whole deck, and a 
great wall of snow is built on the ice around the ship 
as high as her bulwarks, to keep off the wind, while 
some snow-huts are built near by as store-houses. 



74 OLD OCEAN. 

And now the days grow so short that only at mid- 
day does the sun shine, and long before Christmas it 
is almost as dark at noon as at midnight. You know- 
how this is, don't you ? 

How the sun being so far north of the equator in 
summer, can be seen at the pole to roll round and 
round the horizon, instead of in a sideway-curve over- 
head ; and how, oppositely, when it has gone to the 
south of the equator in winter, though equally visible 
to the seals and penguins of the antartic sea, the 
dwellers about the north pole get no sight of it at all 
for nearly six months. To the terrors of the bitter 
cold of the winter — cold which has been known to 
go as low as 60 degrees below zero and freeze ether 
— are added total darkness, except for star-light. 

But these winter months are not days of idle gloom 
to the explorer. Harnessing his teams of dogs to 
his sledges, he pushes his way over the roughly frozen 
sea, and seeks to gain a point far north of where his 
ship has been able to go. It is by means of sledges 
and not of ships that the highest latitude known 
to man — about 84 — has been reached; but many 
solitary graves mark their tracks. 



THE POLAR REGIONS. 77 

Too often the winter's gales and the slow crowding 
of the ice-floe have broken the ship to pieces, or lifted 
her up on to the ice and placed her so that she cannot 
be relaunched. Then the crew must take sledges 
and small boats and work their way homeward as 
best they can. The whole history of voyaging can 
tell no stories to equal the adventures of these ship- 
wrecked Arctic crews, and there is hardly a single 
record of an expedition which does not contain 
some narrative of the kind. 

Such boat-journeys would in almost every case 
have failed had not the castaways been able to get 
birds and animals to feed upon, since they would be 
unable to carry away from the ship enough preserved 
food. No point has been reached, however, so far 
north that animals did not live there. Even the wild 
musk-ox in America and the reindeer in Europe and 
Asia have been seen as far north as men have seen 
anything; and cases are known of reindeer bearing 
the brand-marks of European herds, having been 
killed in Greenland, so that they must have come 
across. The polar bear roves throughout the polar 
regions near the coast, foxes are pretty abundant, 



78 OLD OCEAN. 

hares occur on the uttermost islands (and the hare is 
a plant-feeder, remember), and in Siberia the rat-like 
lemming is abundant. As for the water-life, the 
Arctic oceans harbor whales of several species — and 
they are sometimes caught in Baffin's bay with 
Siberian lances sticking in their backs — walruses, 
half a dozen species of seals, which keep open holes 
in the ice, and make burrows beneath the snow which 
covers it, and so pass the winter, and a variety of 
fishes and shell-fish. These afford food to hosts of 
water-birds which retreat in winter only so far south 
as will give them right enough to see to fish, and in 
summer fly northward to nesting-places often far with- 
in the charmed circle which yet defies our exploration. 
Where there is so much animal life, humanity can 
dwell ; and we find the whole of the Arctic coast-lands 
haunted by scattered bands of degraded Eskimos, 
whose habits and history are of the greatest interest, 
not only because they live in such eternal desolation, 
but because they are believed to be the remnants of 
the most ancient of all the natives of our continent. 



V.— SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 

ALONG with progress in sea explorations has 
gone a like progress in ship-building, and at 
about an equal pace. That wood would float, that 
a log hollowed out served better as a support in 
water than one whole, and that an imitation of a 
hollowed log, made by putting several pieces together, 
was best of all, were among the first facts learned by- 
savage men. Thus came the canoes and first rude 
boats. For rivers and bays these proved enough, 
and ages passed before any advance was made. 

The idea of rigging is equally simple of explana- 
tion, though some romantic stories are told by 
the old mythologists as to its origin. That a 
strong breeze moves a canoe out of its way, 
and that, if a man in a canoe holds a skin out- 
stretched or a thick bush upright, the force would 

79 



8o 



OLD OCEAN. 



send him along as fast as he cared to go, without the 
labor of paddling, were facts quickly and gratefully- 
seized upon by the earliest boatmen. To have a skin 
ready for the purpose, and to set up a pole to hold it 




SHIP WITH ALL SAILS SET. 



Sails: i, Outer jib. 2, Jib. 3, Foretop-mast stay-sail. 4, Fore royal. 
5, Foreto'gallant sail. 6, Upper foretop-sail. 7, Lower foretop-sail. 
8, Fore-sail. 9, Main to'gallant stay-sail. 10, Main top-mast stay-sail, 
n, Main sky-sail. 12, Main royal. 13, Main to'gallant sail. 14, Upper 
main top-sail. 15, Lower main top-sail. 16, Main-sail. 17, Main spencer. 
18, Mizzen royal. 19, Mizzen to'gallant sail. 20, Upper mizzen top-sail. 
21, Lower mizzen top-sail. 22, Cross jack. 23, Spanker. 24, Fiying jib. 
25, Foretop-mast studdin'-sail. 26, Foreto' gallant studdin'-sail. 






SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 8l 

in position, were easy matters; yet in this simple 
arrangement you have the first sail. 

But skins were heavy and too valuable for such a 
purpose. People who spent much time on the 
water, therefore, like the ancient Egyptians, and the 
islanders of the Chinese and South seas, soon devised 
a way of weaving rushes or splints of bamboo 
into broad mats, and thus were able, on account of 
their lightness, to carry much larger and more 
effective sails, which were kept outstretched by one 
or more cross-poles or spars, and could be taken 
down quickly. Many such sails are in use to this 
day among the boatmen of Eastern nations. With the 
discovery of how to make cloth out of hempen, 
cotton, woollen and silken fibres, came a still better 
material for sails and ropes. 

In the same way it was only gradually that men 
learned the best shape for the hulls of their boats. 
From the very first, I imagine, canoes were pointed, 
— at least in front ; but this made the original dug- 
out more than ever liable to upset, and a smooth, 
round bottom causes a boat to drift sideways. At 
first the latter difficulty was avoided by putting a 



82 OLD OCEAN. 

board or stiffened mat over the side, so as to 
counteract the leeway caused by the wind ; but it was 
not long before the keel was added to the bottom, 
which cured both disadvantages. 

It is said that the oldest forms of paddles of which 
we have any record among the Egyptian or Assyrian 
hieroglyphs show them to have been shaped some- 
what like the hand and arm, and that similar paddles 
were to be seen only a few years ago on the canals 
in Holland. This is natural, because undoubtedly 
the very first paddle ever used was the naked hand. 
Short paddles were soon found less powerful than 
long ones ; but in order to work these latter it was 
necessary to brace them against something in 
the middle. Notches were therefore cut in the edge 
of the boat, your paddle has become an oar, and by 
and by the notch is to be replaced by a carefully 
formed row-lock, and boatmen will learn that it is 
best to feather their oars when they row. 

Now build a great canoe-shaped hull, able to hold 
a hundred men, out of hewn ribs and planking ; set 
up one or more short masts with a square sail hung 
on each of them, arrange as many oars as can be 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 85 

accommodated, with a single long oar in the middle 
behind, or two oars, one on each side of the stern, to 
steer by, and you have the plan of the vessels that 
the Phoenicians and Carthaginians carried their 
freight and fought their battles in ; that Cleopatra, in 
all the splendor of her court, sailed down to Alexan- 
dria with; that brought tin from Britain, that later 
figured in the adventures of the Northmen and 
formed the navies of western Europe. 

So, though the trading-vessels of the ancients 
depended on the wind for the most part, yet they all 
carried and used oars ; while for the ships of war or 
pleasure, which were made longer and narrower than 
the traders, sails were held to be of small service, and 
oars alone were employed. In the time of the 
Roman Empire these row-boats-of-war were so made 
as to allow two, three or even more tiers of oars, one 
over the other, to be worked by rowers who did none 
of the fighting and were protected by high bulwarks. 
Some of these boats, then and several centuries 
after, were built of a size almost equal to large 
vessels nowadays, and their oarsmen were trained 
into that precision of moving in perfect unison which 



86 



OLD OCEAN. 



alone could propel such heavy craft. Their construc- 
tion was careful, too. They were often, if not always, 
sheathed with lead, and were put together with copper 
nails, since iron spikes rusted out. It was the 
fashion to dye the sails in brilliant colors or to 




Sails : 



SLOOP. 

Jib. 2, Gaff top-sail. 3, Main-sail. 



embroider them, and the cabins were often magnifi- 
cently furnished. Do you not remember Ezekiel's 
description of the vessels of Tyre ? 

Their ship boards are of fir trees of Senir, their masts 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 87 

of cedars, their oars of oaks of Bashan, their benches of 
ivory, their sails of fine embroidered linen. 

These row-boats held their place as war vessels 
through 2000 years of history, beginning with the 
battle of Salamis in 480 B. C. which saved Greece 
from the grasp of Xerxes. There were 380 open boats 
on the side of the Greeks there, each carrying about 18 
soldiers besides the rowers, who sat amidships (or in 
the centre), while the soldiers stood upon two platforms, 
one at the prow and one over the stern. The ends 
of all those ancient boats were built up into a high 
projection forward, which ended in a serpent's head 
or a swan's neck, the face of an owl or some odd 
image ; and we keep the tradition of it until now by 
putting a carved figure-head under our bowsprits. 

The battle of Salamis taught the Greeks the value 
of a navy — which, by the way, they were at first afraid 
to send around the southern peninsula, and so used 
to haul across the isthmus of Corinth — and helped 
them greatly to attain the power they afterwards had. 
They improved, too, on the boats of their fathers, 
extended the end platforms to meet over the heads 
of the rowers so as to make a deck and give room for 



88 OLD OCEAN. 

more soldiers, and devised " engines " to aid 
them. Their enemies were equally skilful, and the 
hand-to-hand naval conflicts of those days were 
horrible. From the bows protruded sharp prows 
designed to strike and sink an enemy's vessel, and 
over these prows projected platforms where men 
stood ready to drop heavy stones or pointed masses 
of iron upon the enemy's boat when it had come 
within reach, to crush it; or great grappling irons 
which should draw it close up so that the soldiers 
could leap upon the deck of their foe and fight there. 
From the masts, also, were suspended battering-rams 
and other contrivances to break in the bulwarks of 
an enemy; and every vessel carried catapults, or 
immense cross-bows, worked by tackle and windlasses, 
and which at short range shot large stones with the 
force of cannon-balls. Lastly there was the dread- 
ful Greek fire, the knowledge of how to make which 
has been lost. It consisted of several liquids — the 
principal one being naphtha, it is thought — which, 
when mixed and exposed to the air, instantly took fire. 
A vessel armed with this carried several tubes of iron 
or bronze projecting from her walls, and when an 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 89 

engagement came on her crew pumped through these 
nozzles streams of flaming liquid accompanied by dense 
fumes and a suffocating odor. The spouting liquid 
fire falling upon a man would burn him to death 
instantly, while the woodwork it reached was set into 
a blaze, so that those who escaped burning were 
likely to be drowned. Arrows wrapped with tow 
soaked in this mixture, flew through the air like 
meteors to set on fire any boat they lighted upon, 
and nothing but sand or smothering would extinguish 
the flames ; for to throw on water was only to spread 
it the further. I think it a good fortune that Greek 
fire is lost to our knowledge, for the world could well 
spare so fearful an agent of harm. 

After the Roman power sank there is little to tell 
of naval history, and nothing of commerce, until the 
western part of Europe began to wake up. People 
had sea-boats all this time, though, and were trading 
and fighting, and the Vikings, in their short, thick, 
blunt-bowed, unwieldy little vessels, had done won- 
ders in voyaging. The natives of the British isles 
kept almost incessant wars with the Danes and 
Normans and Scandinavians back and forth across 



90 OLD OCEAN. 

the Channel, until the grand expedition of William 
the Conqueror in 1066 settled matters somewhat. 
The Normans were at that time the most powerful 
people in northern Europe, and they were ambitious 
to extend their rule southward. The finest of seamen, 
their fleets rounded the headlands of Spain, passed 
into the Mediterranean, forced their way to Italy 
and overran its ports, sailed around to its eastern 
coast, and began to believe themselves masters of the 
whole region. But over there stood the refined and 
beautiful city of Venice — the leader in power and 
wealth of all southern Europe. The Venetians heard 
with dismay of the approach of these rough northern 
strangers with their ruddy complexions, their tangled 
yellow beards and their uncouth tongue. A. fleet 
was quickly manned and sent to oppose them. The 
two forces met near Durazzo, in one of the hardest 
sea-fights those many-battled waters ever witnessed, 
and the Normans — all that were left of them — 
hastened homeward and kept themselves in their own 
ocean. 

After that came the activity by sea and land of 
the Crusades, and Venice became supreme in the 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 9 1 

Mediterranean. It was chiefly through the force 
sent by her against the Saracens, in the twelfth cen- 
tury, that the Infidel fleet in the bay of Jaffa was 
beaten, and that, a little later, the stronghold of Tyre 
was captured. Afterwards Genoa wrested the control 
of the seas from Venice, and had her century or two of 
supremacy. But these old conflicts seem to have 
produced little change or improvement in ship-build- 
ing. As before, all the long piratical wars in the 
Mediterranean and along the Atlantic coast were 
carried on in big row-boats, which could be managed 
in a battle more easily than the clumsy, round-bodied 
sail-vessels. The fighting was all at close quarters, 
and the war-vessels were often shielded on the out- 
side with iron belts and armor, which protected them 
from blows and injury from sharp rams. To pierce 
or break the vessel ; to deprive it of its rudder, its 
sails, its oars ; to open in its side or at the prow a 
large aperture so as to endanger its sinking, seems 
to have been the tactics of every commander. The 
knights of the Middle Ages, when combatting on 
shore, always fought man to man, despising anyone 
who would have sought to kill the horse of the war- 



92 OLD OCEAN. 

rior whom he could not eject from the saddle with the 
spear. At sea this was never the case. In all ages the 
vessels were struck in order to overthrow the men ; and 
for this reason the vessel was strengthened, cuirassed, 
protected by as many towers as possible, until it 
became a sort of floating fortress, bastioned, bul- 
warked, defended by archers, slingers and soldiers 
armed with spears, swords, axes and maces : in short, 
with all the arms used in the camps or in beseiged 
towns. Such were the " fleets " and tactics with 
which our ancestors defended the " snug little islands," 
almost or quite up to the time of Henry VIII ; and 
though merchant vessels retained the use of sails, 
they were of the simplest patterns, and adapted to 
little rougher work than the comparatively peaceful 
waters of the Mediterranean. 

In the fourteenth century we begin to hear 
of a revival in the art of ship-building and the 
use of sails, as, indeed, was needful if the long voy- 
ages were to be undertaken which the discovery of 
the compass now rendered possible. In this revival 
the Venetians and Genoese took the lead, but the 
English, whose monarchs gloried in the title of 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 93 

" Sovereigns of the Sea," were not far behind. 
There was a large variety of vessels in that day, rude 
though they were, and called by names we should 
hardly recognize now. What would you make of 
these lines of old Hardyorg : 

" They fought full sore upon the waters of Sayrn, 
With carrickes many, well stuffed and arrayed ; 

And many other shippes great of Hispayne, 
Barges, babyngers, and galleys unaffrayed, 

Which proudly came upon our shippes unprayed." 

Though the hulls of these vessels were large and 
tight, their shape was poorly adapted for speed or 
for safety in bad weather. Their decks were built 
up into immensely high structures at the stern and 
bows, after the old galley model, and to form forts 
for the soldiers. Our word " forecastle " reminds us 
of this old usage. Their masts were single sticks — 
not divided into top-masts — and hence were obliged 
to be thick and heavy ; and they bore upon their 
summits large "top-castles" where a number of 
marines stood in a battle to shoot down upon the 
enemy's decks. This weight above, and height of 



94 OLD OCEAN. 

surface exposed to the wind, and their rude rigging, 
made it impossible for them to sail safely, except 
with a fair and gentle wind (they never attempted it 
otherwise), and they were required to carry an enor- 
mous quantity of ballast. There was so little room 
for anything but sleeping-berths, armament and a 
cooking room in the war-ships, that every fleet had 
to take with it small vessels carrying provisions ; and 
the case was little better in merchant vessels. 

The ships in which Vasco cli Gama, Columbus, the 
Cabots and other explorers did their marvellous work 
were no better than this : strangely inefficient it seems 
to us, and we wonder that some of the simplest con- 
trivances in rigging were not adopted centuries 
before they came into use, until we remember that it 
was not for long, speedy voyages that vessels were 
intended up to the sixteenth century or so, but 
simply as a means of carrying a great number of men 
or huge cargoes. 

However, as the known world widened and trade 
grew, the inventions of private ship-owners continually 
improved the rigging, and Columbus' " carravel " 
had four short masts, the forward one having a square 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 95 

sail and the three after-masts that Mediterranean 
style of swinging three-cornered sail called lateen. 
At this time, too, pirates sprang up and exerted them- 
selves to make their crafts as swift as possible, to 
escape their pursuers, while the regular navies, which 
governments now began to support, afforded oppor- 
tunities to test inventions and adopt new models. 
To this same end also the introduction of gunpowder 
and cannons into warfare contributed ; for now it was 
no longer needful to fight hand to hand, since ships 
could be defeated at a distance. That gunpowder was 
known to the Chinese thousands of years ago, is certain ; 
that it was used by the Egyptians and Greeks is sur- 
mised, but it was not until about 1340 that records 
show equipments of cannons of brass and iron in 
estimates for ships, and of hand-guns for soldiers. 
Some of these old ship-cannon had from two to five 
chambers or barrels, and were covered with orna- 
ments. Bows and arrows, cross-bows and hurling- 
engines remained, nevertheless, many years in com- 
pany with the guns, even down to the time of 
Henry VIII. 

From the fourteenth century, progress was rapid 



9 6 



OLD OCEAN. 



towards the rigging of ships as we now see them, or 
rather as they were forty years ago when sailing ves- 
sels were at the height of their prosperity, before 
steamers came to do away with sails, as sails had 
outstripped the old galleys. 




CAT-BOAT. 
i. Main-sail. 



FISHING SCHOONER. 
Sails: i, Flying jib. 2, Jib. 3. Fore-sail. 



4, Stay-sail. 5, Gaff top-sail. 6, Main-sail. 

The rigging of sailing vessels now is divided into 
" standing " and " running " rigging; the former in- 
cludes the stays to the masts, now generally made of 
wire, the shrouds, and such other rope-work as is not 
adjustable. A vessel looks like a skeleton when 
" stripped " of all the mass of ropes, lines, halliards. 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 



97 



sheets and tackle which seem such a tangled maze 
to a landsman's eye, but are so clear and handy to the 
" able seaman." The sails, too, can be divided into 
two classes : first, those attached to a boom and gaff, 
or to a stay ; and, second, those spread between 
yards which are swung across the mast, and are 
known as " square " sails. All the variations in 
shape — except the lugger sail of New Orleans — in 
this country can be counted in one or the other of 
these classes. 

The styles of rigs to be seen in American waters 
are not many, and are easily described — at least so 
that you can recognize them and call them by their 
right names. Let us begin with the simplest : 

A sloop has one mast and a main-sail,* and one or 
more jibs ; there may also be a gaff top-sail. 

A cat-boat is a kind of single-masted boat which 
has no bowsprit, but has its mast stepped in the 
extreme prow, and only a main-sail. There is a kind 
of sloop-sail called a leg-o'-mutton, which is pointed 
at the top, has no gaff, and is seen most often in the 



* I must refer you to the dictionary for definitions of these sails, if you 
don't know them now. 



98 OLD OCEAN. 

Connecticut sharpies, where there are often two masts 
rigged this way. 

Of two-masted rigs, the oldest is the brig, which 
has square sails on both masts, just like the main and 
mizzen masts of a full-rigged ship, to be described in 
the next paragraph. Then there is the brigantine, a 
slight modification of the brig, and the hermaphrodite 
brig, which has schooner-rig on the main-mast and 
square-rig on the fore-mast. This will explain itself 
when you learn what a schooner is. The schooner is 
a purely American invention, and one of the greatest 
of all Yankee notions. It is two-masted, and the 
sails are alike on both, — a big squarish canvas 
stretched between a boom below and a gaff above, 
and between the gaff and the top-mast is a triangular 
canvas called a gaff top-sail ; the bowsprit supports 
one, two or three jibs. Sometimes on the foretop- 
mast is placed a square sail, which makes the vessel 
a top-sail schooner. Now they are building many 
three-masted schooners, but three-masted vessels are 
generally rigged as barks (or barques) or as ships ; 
or with square sails forward, and called barkentines ; 
for, though we have come to speak of any large 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 99 

vessel as a " ship," yet in nautical and proper lan- 
guage a ship is a vessel rigged in a particular way, 
and it is nothing else. 

Masts have their proper names : the highest is in 
the middle of the vessel, and is called the main-mast; 
the next tallest is nearer the prow, and is the fore- 
mast ; the third is in the stern, and named mizzen-mast. 
The sails and rigging take their names from the masts 
to which they belong, as, for example, main shrouds, 
mizzen shrouds, fore shrouds, mizzen-royal main-top- 
sail-yard, foretop-gallant-staysail, and so on. The 
three masts, bowsprit, yards and stays of a full-rigged 
ship are capable of spreading an enormous breadth 
of canvas — thousands of square yards ; yet in the 
trade-winds vessels sometimes go week after week 
without touching a single thread night or day. All 
of the sails upon the masts are square, and take their 
names from the sections of the mast opposite which 
they hang. Counting from the deck to the truck, or 
tiptop of the mast, these sails are as follows : On the 
main-mast, main-sail, top-sail (generally in two parts), 
top-gallant-royal and sky-sail. On the mizzen-mast 
are mizzen-sail, mizzen-topsail, mizzen-top-gallant, 



IOO OLD OCEAN. 

mizzen-royal ; on the fore-mast, fore-sa'il, foretop-sail, 
foretop-gallant, fore-royal. The bowsprit sails are the 
foretop-mast, stay-sail, jib, flying jib and outer jib. Be- 
hind the mizzen-mast is a schooner-like sail called a 
spanker; and each of the stays running diagonally 
from mast to mast bears a triangular sail known by 
the name of the particular stay on which it hangs, as 
main-topsail stay-sail, and so on — six in all. In ad- 
dition to all this, a little sail is sometimes set above 
the sky-sail and royals, and another under the bow- 
sprit, while out beyond the ends of the yards are 
extended light additional yards carrying studding- 
sails. There may then be twenty-eight sails set at 
once on a full-rigged ship, besides the studdin'-sails. 
Rig the fore-mast of a three-masted vessel with square 
sails, and the main and mizzen masts with schooner 
sails, and you have a bark. A frigate is a ship made 
for war, and intended to be handled with quickness. 
But the tendency is more and more toward giving 
up this elaborate arrangement of lofty square sails, 
and substituting three-masted schooners. This is 
due to the fact that the schooner-style will sail closer 
to the wind, gives as much force in proportion as the 



SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 101 

ship-style, while it is far less expensive to build, and 
more quickly and easily managed, not requiring 
nearly as many men, and therefore being cheaper to 
run as well as to set up. The schooner has worked 
its way, by proving its merit, well to the front in the 
estimation of seamen of all nations ; which is why I 
have called it one of the greatest of Yankee notions. 



VI.— WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 

THE ancient mode of fighting has been told 
in the last chapter ; but I did not make it plain 
that all those old armaments were furnished as required 
by the various ports of a kingdom to which the ships 
afterwards returned, and were given back to their 
owners. This system was found so inconvenient that 
kings gradually came to build ships of their own, 
and to keep them at public expense ready at all 
times for war. In England, Henry VIII. was the 
first monarch to adopt this plan, and his first ship, 
laying the foundation of the Royal navy, was the 
Great Harry, built in 1488. For a whole century 
after that, England was almost continually at war on 
the seas with the French and Spaniards. Towards 
the last of this time, however, Queen Elizabeth 
strengthened and organized her navy very greatly, 



WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 103 

so that she was ready for the first important 
event in English naval history — the repulse of the 
Spanish armada. 

This armada was a fleet of 132 large ships and 
many small vessels, mounting altogether over 3000 
pieces of cannon. It carried 8776 seamen, over 
2000 slaves to row in the galleys, and nearly 22,000 
soldiers. In comparison to this, England could 
oppose only a miserably small fleet ; and the news of 
the Spanish advance spread fright throughout Great 
Britain, and also the greatest excitement, so that, 
finally ninety vessels were gathered under command 
of Charles Howard, and cruised in the mouth of the 
Channel. His sub-commanders were all men whose 
names are famous as explorers — Sir Francis Drake, 
Sir John Hawkins and Sir Martin Frobisher. At 
the beginning of June the huge armada left Spain 
with pompous rejoicing ; but almost at once a storm 
scattered it, and drove it into various ports very much 
crestfallen. This gave the English a chance to com- 
plete their outfit, for it was seven weeks before the 
armada again put to sea, and after much bad 
weather, appeared off Plymouth " like so many float- 



104 0LD OCEAN. 

ing castles." Admiral Howard let them go by, and 
then sailed upon their rear. The winds were variable, 
storms and calms succeeded one another, and gene- 
rally only portions of the fleets were engaged at any 
one time. Though so much smaller and weaker 
than the Spanish ships, the English vessels sailed 
better — poorly enough at best ! — were more 
nimble, and could shoot squarely into the foreign 
hulls, while the Spanish gun-decks were so high that 
most of their cannon-balls went harmlessly over the 
low-lying Englishmen. Thus for a week the two 
fleets were backing and filling in almost constant 
fight, which gave opportunities for wonderful feats of 
single-handed courage. Then the shattered armada, 
shorn of its pride, mourning a loss of forty large ships 
and 10,000 men, crept back to Spain. This surpris- 
ing victory was followed by many expeditions against 
the Spanish coast and seizures of rich Spanish vessels. 
At this time England demanded that every vessel 
sailing the seas should strike its flag in the presence 
of a British man-of-war, in token of submission. 
This was the cause of many small fights, and began, 
in 1604, the great war with the Dutch, which lasted 



WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 105 

for fifty years, and was followed by a long series of 
battles with almost all the Mediterranean ports, and 
afterwards with Spain and her American islands. 
This, again, was hardly over when war came on with 
the French, which lasted clear through Queen Anne's 
reign, and gives a flavor to so many novels written 
about that interesting time. These long constant wars, 
and the incessant danger from privateers, which were 
private war-vessels permitted to be equipped to range 
for prizes, but not owned by the government, taught all 
the European nations many lessons in sailing and 
sea-fighting, so that they were a very well-built lot of 
ships and fully trained crews on both sides that went 
into the famous battle of Gibraltar in July, 1704. 

The Dutch and English were allies then against 
the French, who held the fortress not so impregnable 
as now. A heavy bombardment and assault in boats 
captured the rock ; but the matter was only half done, 
for there immediately appeared in the offing a large 
French fleet, which was defeated only after terrible 
loss of life. Ever since then England has maintained 
and continually strengthened this great rock, which 
commands the entrance to the Mediterranean. 



106 OLD OCEAN. 

Though peace with France had been declared in 
1748, war on the seas soon began again, and Spain 
also became an object of attack, until in 1762 
Havana was captured by a British squadron, and a 
peace forced upon France and Spain by which Eng- 
land gained possession in America of all Canada, all 
of the Southern part of the United States east of 
the Mississippi, Florida, and several of the West In- 
dian islands, with many possessions and privileges in 
other quarters of the globe. No naval victories ever 
bore more fruit than did these, or were followed by 
a firmer time of peace. 

A little later, however, came the American war of 
the Revolution ; but the naval battles were few, and 
well-known to most American boys. Who has not 
heard of the exploits of Paul Jones, and of the help 
which Rochambeau and other French admirals gave 
us? The American navy was chiefly of that half- 
piratical kind called privateers, however, and very 
often came to grief. 

In the midst of so many gallant exploits, and 
battles of the greatest consequence, it is hard to pick 
any in particular; but perhaps the most celebrated 



WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 



107 



naval encounter of the next few years was the battle 
of the Nile, in which the great Nelson, who afterward 
fell so gloriously at Trafalgar, commanded. A long 
series of brilliant exploits had given Nelson's fame, 
and the vigorous account of them he himself used to 
write home helped his great popularity. In 1 798 he was 
a rear admiral, and was sent to the Mediterranean in 
pursuit of a French fleet, which he finally cornered in 
the bay of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile. Nel- 
son had fifteen ships, thirteen of them " seventy-fours " 
(that is, carrying seventy-four guns each), and one thou- 
sand and twenty-eight guns in all ; to which were op- 
posed one thousand and ten guns carried by seventeen 
ships, the largest of which, Z' Orient, carried one 
hundred and twenty guns. This French fleet was 
anchored in a bended line and pretty close together, 
only a little way from shore, the huge U Orient being 
in the centre. Nelson advanced with his ships, and 
caused each of them to take a position as close as 
possible to its particular foe, and there to anchor. 
This was late in the afternoon, and the sun set upon 
the sight of those thirty-two monstrous ships fastened 
by their anchors in close battle array and hidden in 



108 OLD OCEAN. 

the smoke and flame of their incessant broadsides. 
One by one the masts went down, and the hulls were 
shot to pieces, until before nine o'clock at night half 
a dozen ships had surrendered to the English flag, 
when the whole battle was suspended at a sight which 
drew all the gunners from their grimy work and 
crowded the riggings of friend and foe with eager 
spectators. The great flagship of the French squad- 
ron, L Orient, perhaps the largest man-of-war then 
afloat, was on fire. Almost in a moment the flames 
mounted her tarred rigging and enveloped her mas- 
sive hull. Blazing with a fierceness no land structure 
would show, the remnant of her almost destroyed 
crew had hardly time to throw themselves into the 
water or escape in boats, when her magazines explod- 
ed, and the magnificent vessel burst asunder into a 
volcano of fire, to be swallowed the next instant by 
the black waves. 

This over, the battle was resumed, and continued 
all night. In the morning a few disabled vessels of 
the French were able to sail away; but though 
Nelson's fleet was too badly hurt to follow them, he 
had actually lost no ship except the Bellerophon, 



WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. IO9 

which was still able to float, while several French 
vessels were sunken or burned and several others 
captured. The English loss of life, too, was far less 
than in the French fleet, where there was not a single 
vessel whose captain was not either killed or wound- 
ed. Without one exception, say historians, this 
victory of the Nile is the grandest on record. The 
clearness and wisdom of the admiral's plans, the fine 
seamanship of the captains, the great skill of the 
gunners and the splendid courage of all the men, 
remain unrivalled.- Now our sea battles are fought in 
a different way, and these old heroic but dreadfully 
bloody conflicts are things of the past. 

Perhaps, though, you will think more glorious the 
great battle of Trafalgar on the 21st of October, 1805. 
Lord Nelson had there his flagship Victory carry- 
ing one hundred guns, and thirty-one other ships, 
mounting altogether no less than two thousand 
three hundred cannon. The enemy in this case was 
the combined fleet of France and Spain, and consisted 
of thirty- three vessels having two thousand six hun- 
dred and twenty guns, so that in size and number of 
vessels, and in amount of ordnance, the allies had 



HO OLD OCEAN. 

the advantage. At daylight on the 20th the French 
fleet put to sea from the port of Cadiz ; but it was 
not until the next morning that they approached the 
British squadrons off Cape Trafalgar. Then the 
wind was so light that it was high noon before 
Nelson hoisted on his ship the signals which sent 
that never-to-be-forgotten message, not only to the 
sailors on the other ships, but to British mariners 
everywhere for generations to come — "England expects 
every man will do his duty /" Then the Royal Sov- 
ereign led the way straight into and through the 
enemy's line, firing her broadsides right and left 
as she passed between the Santa Ana and the 
Fougueux. Thus the terrible struggle began. Dif- 
ficult to manage in the almost total calm which 
always follows a naval battle, and is supposed to be 
due to the shock of the air in the firing, the great 
ships drifted near to one and another adversary. in 
turn, or became locked by some entanglement of 
rigging in struggles so close at hand that the flame 
of the guns burnt the woodwork of the opposite hull. 
Ponderous balls went crashing through the oaken 
walls, and showers of pain-dealing splinters flew to do 



WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. Ill 

harm where the balls themselves had killed no one. 
Masts were shot away and fell headlong in a maze 
of rigging, or yards and heavy tackle crashed down 
from aloft, while all the time the thundering of the 
guns and the booming of broadsides rent the air and 
deafened the scorched and blood-spattered gunners. 
Nelson himself was shot by a musket-ball from the 
rigging of a French vessel alongside, and was carried 
below mortally wounded ; but he covered his face and 
his star with a handkerchief, in order that his men 
should not know that their commander had fallen. 
Receiving reports of the battle from time to time 
from Captain Hardy, he continued to give orders and 
mourn his inactivity ; but at four o'clock he became 
speechless, and in a few moments more was dead. 
Of all the noble names of naval story none are 
grander than Nelson's; and his last words ought to 
be as famous as the resolve with which he began this 
marvellous sea-fight : "I have done my duty — I 
thank God for it ! " 

Trafalgar was about the last of the great naval 
battles in the old-fashioned full-rigged wooden ships 
of war. Of course there was no end of hard fighting 



112 OLD OCEAN. 

in wooden line-of-battle ships and frigates after that 
in all parts of the world ; but before many years 
steam was introduced into the construction and man- 
agement of ships, and iron-plating began to be used. 
This produced as great a change in the methods of 
naval warfare as did the superseding of the old 
galleys by well-rigged sailing craft. 

The guns of the old ships of war, though so 
numerous, were all of small size, the heaviest of them 
being only twenty-fours and thirty-twos ; that is, 
shooting round balls twenty-four or thirty-two pounds 
in weight. The United States has lately cast some 
smooth-bored cannon for land-defences, hurling a 
solid round shot weighing nearly two thousand 
pounds. These are the famous twenty-inch colum- 
biads. 

Soon after Nelson's day, the wars in the Medi- 
terranean and in American waters, where forts had 
to be bombarded and improved ships were met with, 
guns of much larger calibre (that is, breadth of bore) 
were made, and hurled their shot with so much 
greater force that the oaken walls were no longer a 
sufficient protection, and builders began to plate the 



WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 115 

hulls of their vessels with sheets of iron, whence 
came the name "ironclads." Next artillerymen 
cut spiral grooves in the bore of their cannon, like 
those in the barrel of a rifle, and fitted to them an 
elongated conical projectile — the word ball won't 
do for anything but a round shot, while p?'ojectile may 
mean anything thrown. The advantage gained by 
this rifling was, that a projectile (which goes straight 
point foremost to its mark) is called upon to punch 
a smaller hole than a ball of the same weight and 
velocity, and therefore its force can be exerted more 
powerfully. You can easily understand what I mean 
if you take a round chunk of iron and try to drive it 
into a board by a single blow of a hammer. You 
will succeed very poorly ; but if you forge this piece 
into a nail, one strong blow will send it well into the 
plank. Pointed projectiles and rifled guns, then, 
have taken the place almost entirely in ironclad ships 
of war, of the old smooth-bores and round shot. 

But with better knowledge of how to manufacture 
and how to manage large ordnance, went a constant 
growth in the size of guns, until now an ironclad's 
armament is chiefly guns having bores ten or twelve 



Il6 OLD OCEAN. 

inches in diameter and carrying a projectile weight 
three-quarters of a ton. Such cannon would knock 
one of the old Victorys or Bellerophons into kind- 
ling wood in a few minutes ; while there are few 
forts in the world- — certainly not one in America — 
that would not crumble under their fire between 
breakfast and luncheon. 

But as fast as the guns got bigger, the armor of 
vessels became thicker and the number of guns they 
carried was reduced. Instead of the old three and 
four deckers, standing as high out of the water as a 
church, bristling with cannons' mouths, and covered 
above by an enormous structure of spars and ropes 
and canvas, we now see long shapeless vessels with 
scarcely more beauty or shape about them than a 
canal-boat, and with only a few sails. Instead of the 
hundred guns there are only half a dozen, and in 
place of the oaken bulwarks are walls of solid iron, 
while the monster is driven to its position by deeply 
hidden engines and submerged propellers instead of 
working grandly into its place in the line by skilful 
handling of top-sails. The old romantic, picturesque 
glory of a sea-fight is gone ; a battle between two 



WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 117 

modern ironclads would be much like two volcanoes 
firing jets of lava at each other, for all one could see. 
But we can afford to lose the romance, for the dread- 
ful carnage of the bloody decks is also a thing of the 
past ; and unless some grand catastrophe occurs 
which sends the whole huge ship to the bottom 
before her crew can escape, the present loss of life 
is small. 

The most of the iron ships of war building by 
England, Germany and Italy — which are the leading 
nations in naval matters now — are turret ships. The 
idea of a round tower of iron on deck from which 
cannon should be fired, came out in our war of 
the Rebellion, and produced the Monitor, Her 
turret, however, went round on wheels, and the great 
gun in it was carried along, so that instead of moving 
and aiming the cannon, they wheeled and aimed the 
turret. This plan has been abandoned, and the gun- 
carriage is now moved within the turret, and fired 
out of it as it would be out of the casement of a fort. 

Of course the moving of these enormous gun- 
carriages, and the handling of the heavy ammunition 
in loading, is all done by steam machinery. 



Il8 OLD OCEAN. 

On the turret — sometimes a ship has two or three 
— and the region amidships, where (as low in down the 
hull as possible) the massive engines are placed, the 
armor is the heaviest. It consists of great plates 
of iron or steel moulded to the precise form of the 
vessels, and bolted on to the frame. These plates 
are as thick as possible ; but when more than twelve 
inches in thickness is required, as is often the case, 
a second layer must be placed over the first. 

Lastly, the prow of the ironclad below the water- 
line is extended out into a sharp knife or point of 
steel called a ram. Driven by the enormous weight 
of the ironclad in motion, nothing could stand a 
blow from this ram, and the vessel struck by it is 
sure to sink. Nothing, then, would be further from 
the thoughts of a modern captain than to allow 
his enemy to run into him, as used so often to be 
done in the old frigate fighting. 

A first-class ironclad costs from $2,000,000 to 
$3,000,000. 



VII.— ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 

AS the sea has furnished opportunities for so much 
good — manly exertion, knowledge of the world, 
acquaintance with people outside of one's own coun- 
try, and constant wealth — so it has given a chance 
for bad men to pursue their villainy, and the guard- 
ing of shore-towns and merchant vessels has always 
been a part of the usefulness and duty of a nation's 
naval force. 

As on land there are robbers and highwaymen, so 
on the ocean robber-ships have always been lying in 
wait for vessels loaded with treasure, and have landed 
crews of marauders to make havoc with rich seaboard 
provinces. Such robbers on the high seas were 
termed pirates — so named from a Greek word mean- 
ing " one who attacks at sea " — and their crime was 

visited by the old laws with the most torturing meth- 

119 



120 OLD OCEAN. 

ods of death. They have existed from the earliest 
records of commerce, and are by no means got rid 
of yet ; but they were never more daring than when 
the laws against them were severest. 

The first pirates who figure in history with any 
great fame were those who had taken possession of 
some islands in the^Egean sea, and who made forage 
upon the commercial vessels plying between the 
western and middle parts of the Mediterranean, and 
the rich cities of the Syrian coast and the Bosphorus. 
You will remember that, when Julius Caesar was a 
young man, and was making a voyage to the East 
with a large number of soldiers and other persons, 
he was set upon by pirates, captured and carried 
away to an island where they had their homes and 
warehouses. 

Life was held cheap in those days by kings and 
subjects both ; it need not surprise us, then, to learn 
that these Greek or Byzantine pirates were accus- 
tomed to kill all their prisoners as soon as they found 
nothing more was to be gained from them. Their 
usual plan was to tie them, two together, back to 
back, and hurl them alive into the sea. Some they 



ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 121 

tortured in order to make them reveal further riches, 
others they retained as material for a little amuse- 
ment called " walking the plank." Prisoners selected 
for this pleasantry were treated with the most extraor- 
dinary politeness and given the best of fare for 
several days, until they came to have the greatest 
confidence in their captors, and think them very good 
fellows after all. Then some fine afternoon a plank 
would be pushed out across the bulwark, and, amid a 
profusion of bows and compliments, the amazed 
prisoners would be invited (and compelled) " to walk 
home." The wretches thought it good fun to witness 
the terror of the men, cheated with hopes, as they 
fell from the end of the bobbing plank into the 
raging waters. 

Though the pirates who took Caesar did not know 
who he was, they surmised from his purple robes 
and large retinue that he was a person of distinction. 
Caesar himself, the story says, did not seem to regard 
the matter as anything more than a jolly adventure, 
and joked the ruffians with threats of what he would 
do to them when he got home — he would hang 'em 
all, he told them. Meanwhile they treated him well, 



122 OLD OCEAN, 

hoping to get a large ransom, and he rather enjoyed 
it, joining their games and amusing them by his royal 
airs and graces. Instead of a ransom, however, one 
day a large squadron of Roman galleys appeared, 
Caesar was rescued, and the pirates were hanged, sure 
enough. 

The intricate channels, many harbors and rich 
islands of that archipelago remained a hiding-place 
of sea-robbers, however, and is so yet, though every 
few years, from Caesar's time till now, the kings of 
the surrounding countries have sent expeditions to 
break them up. In the sixteenth century piracy in 
that region was especially strong. The crews were 
chiefly Turkish, but the great leaders were two 
Roumanians, the brothers Hayraddin and Aruch Bar- 
barossa (" Redbeard "). 

Now, to understand what is coming, you must take 
note that in the centre of the northern coast of Africa 
lay the district of Algeria or Algiers, at first a sul- 
tanate of the Mohammedan Empire. When Spain 
expelled the Moors, and pursued her victories across 
the straits, however, Algeria fell under her rule, and 
remained so until the death of King Ferdinand in 



ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 1 25 

15 16. Then the Algerians sent an embassy to Aruch 
Barbarossa, requesting him to aid them in driving out 
the Spaniards, and promising a share in the spoils. 
He eagerly accepted this proposition, seeing more in 
it than his hosts had any idea of ; for the moment 
the Spaniards had been beaten and expelled, Red- 
beard murdered the prince he had come there to 
help, seized upon the city and port for himself, and 
made it headquarters for that system of desperate 
piracy which became the dread of all Europe. 
These robbers of the sea called themselves corsairs, 
from an Italian word signifying a race ; and they 
generally won, because they had the best and swiftest 
vessels of that time. Their flag was jet black, and 
their reputations became equally dark, so that even 
yet to call a man as bad as a Barbary pirate is to 
mean that he could not be much worse if he tried. 

I have striven to get at the history or origin of the 
black flag, but have been able to discover nothing 
about it, except that from time out of memory a black 
flag has been a sign of piracy. Flags or banners, or 
something to serve their purpose, have always been 
carried by armies. In the early days of Egypt and 



126 OLD OCEAN. 

Israel, Babylon and Tyre, and even down to the wars 
of Rome, they were made of metal, and were called 
standards. Each band, or tribe, or company of sol- 
diers from a single region followed its own device — 
usually some image or animal — cut out of thin metal 
and mounted on a staff. As tribes and armies grew 
larger certain standards became prominent and lesser 
ones disappeared. Thus the eagle was the device 
of the Roman Emperors ; and the various eagles 
which figure on the coats of arms and flags of Euro- 
pean states perpetuate the memory of the " victorious 
standards " of the Caesars. 

By and by metal pennons and banners all on one 
side of the staff were used in place of the standards. 
After this came cloth flags, and often these were 
made of silk and were very gorgeous, particularly 
those used on the old ships. The great flag under 
which William the Conqueror sailed to the conquest 
of England was exceedingly costly, having been 
embroidered in intricate designs by titled ladies of 
his realm and presented to him. After nations and 
commerce began to take firm shape, governments 
adopted national flags, and forbade private banners 



ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 1 27 

except on merchant vessels within certain limits. 
Definite rules were made about the hoisting of flags 
on ships, too, and they were arranged for signalling. 

Nowadays a white flag, all over the world, means 
truce or peace or surrender ; a red flag gives an 
alarm, and used to be hoisted in shore-towns and on 
beacons to inform the people inland that an enemy 
was about to land and that they must hasten to the 
coast to repel them. A black flag means "no quar- 
ter ; " that is, that all prisoners taken on both sides 
will be killed. As this was the general rule among 
pirates, and in fighting them, it came to stand for 
piracy. Its only ornament was sometimes a skull 
and crossbones. 

Now let us go back to Barbarossa and his career. 

Redbeard's first care was to fortify the city of 
Algiers; and he expended a great deal of money and 
labor on the perfection of the harbor, compelling all 
his prisoners and thousands of the citizens to work 
as slaves on these defences. 

Meanwhile his vessels were ranging the length 
and breadth of the Mediterranean and cruising out 
upon the Atlantic, intercepting merchant ships and 



128 OLD OCEAN. 

fighting with vessels of war. The Spanish colonies 
in America, a few years later, began sending home 
immense treasures dug in the silver and gold mines 
of Peru and Mexico, and extorted from the natives, 
or stolen from the temples of those unhappy coun- 
tries. These fleets of treasure-ships, though con- 
voyed by war-ships, were often attacked and cap- 
tured by the corsairs ; and whenever it happened 
that the pirates were defeated, they would land upon 
the nearest unprotected coast of Spain, France or 
Italy, and burn and pillage some town in revenge. 
How galling this was to all merchants and travellers 
we can hardly understand in these days; but so 
strong were the corsairs that the fleets and armies 
of various governments, and even of the Pope, which 
were sent against them could not gain their strong- 
hold or suppress their cruises, at least for more than 
a short time. Not Algiers alone, but Tunis, Tripoli 
and Morocco also harbored piratical vessels in 
every port, and the rulers shared their spoils. This 
lasted even down to the present century, and until 
England got possession of Gibraltar, whereupon she 
sent a large fleet to Algiers, shelled the city into 



ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 1 29 

pieces, burned all the pirate ships, forced them to 
yield up all Christian slaves, and keep their cruisers 
at home. That was the end of the corsairs; but 
there is many a small, sneaking imitation of a pirate 
yet lurking round the grape and olive growing islands 
of that sunny sea. 

Turkish and Barbary pirates were not the only 
ones. Though they did not go under that name, 
the old Norwegian vikings and the rough Norman 
barons were scarcely anything else in fact, as their 
neighboring coasts could testify ; but this was away 
back before modern affairs began. Then, when 
America was discovered and the Spaniards and 
French began to colonize the West Indies, and to 
dig mines in the continents of South and Central 
America, a new set of pirates sprang up, than which 
the world has never seen worse. These were the 
Freebooters and the Buccaneers. 

As the archipelago east of Greece had sheltered 
the hordes of the Turkish corsairs, so the many 
islands, crooked channels, reefs hidden from all but 
the local pilots, small harbors and abundant food of 
the Antilles, made the West Indies the safest place 



130 OLD OCEAN. 

in the world for pirates to pursue their work. To 
these new and wild regions, in the sixteenth century, 
had flocked bad men and adventurers from all over 
the world. When the wars and their chances of plun- 
der died out after the campaigns led by Cortez, 
Pizarro, Balbao and the rest of the Spanish conquista- 
dores, many ruffians seized upon vessels by force, 
or stole them, and turned into robbers of the sea. 
As a rule, they had farms and families on some 
island, and only went freebooting a portion of the 
year, at first. The large island of Hayti, or St. 
Domingo, was then settled by colonists who were of 
three distinct classes — farmers, hunters and cattle- 
men. The last class of men spent their time in the 
wild interior of the island, capturing, herding or 
killing wild cattle. They came to the settlements 
only now and then to get supplies, and then re- 
turned to the wilderness for several months of 
absence again. Finally, a war having arisen be- 
tween this and other islands, the trade of the cattle- 
men was destroyed, and large numbers of them 
joined the Freebooters, who then became extremely 
numerous and formidable ; and so largely was this 



ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 131 

due to their new friends that they lost their old 
name, and were known by the name of the cattle- 
hunters — Buccaneer. 

St. Domingo became the headquarters of the 
Buccaneers, but several small islands were also owned 
and controlled by them. They were made up of 
men of all nations, but were chiefly Spaniards, Dutch 
and negroes. They were thousands in number, pos- 
sessed large fleets of ships and boats, well-armed, 
and had their regular chief and under-officers. The 
most noted, perhaps, of these chiefs was Morgan, 
who was an Englishman. 

They had two methods of work. One was to 
patrol the sea in the track of vessels bound to and 
from Europe and Brazil or Spanish America, and 
seize them. Very often the crews were willing, or 
were compelled, to join the pirates ; but sometimes 
all were killed or carried into slavery. Merchant- 
ships, therefore, all went heavily armed in those 
waters, and many were the bloody battles fought. 

This work, however, employed only a portion of 
the Buccaneers, and was too uncertain a means of 
wealth to suit them. They would, therefore, equip a 



J 32 OLD OCEAN. 

great fleet, enlist men under certain strict rules as 
to sharing the spoils, and sail away to pillage some 
coast. There was hardly an island in the West 
Indies from which, in this way, they did not extort 
immense sums of money under threat of destruction 
of the people. The mainland also suffered from 
the marauders. Great cities, like Cartagena in 
Venezuela, Panama on the Isthmus, Merida in Yuca- 
tan, and Havana, Cuba, were attacked by armies 
of Buccaneers numbering tens of thousands of men. 
Sometimes their fortifications held good and the 
enemy was beaten back; but sooner or later all 
these cities, and others, smaller, were captured, 
burned or partially burned, and robbed of everything 
valuable that they contained. 

"Why did the citizens not hide their wealth?" 
They did; but the Buccaneers put to the most 
dreadful tortures men, women, children, slaves — ev- 
erybody — until they would tell where their money and 
jewels were buried. It is sickening to read of the 
crimes and suffering committed by these wickedest 
of men. For years and years they were the terror of 
the whole Caribbean region. Nor did their enormous 



ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. I33 

riches do them a particle of real good, for they wasted 
it all, the moment they got home, in wild rioting, so 
that the spoils earned by months of hardship, and 
exposure, and wounds, and danger of death, would 
be spent in a week of carousing. Before the end of 
the century, however, the combined naval forces of 
all the nations interested in the commerce of the new 
world broke the power of the Buccaneers, and their 
depredations ceased. Their story is one of the wild- 
est, most romantic, but most terrible pictures in the 
history of the world. 

For the same reason as in the case of the corsairs 
and the Buccaneers, the East Indies have always been 
infested with pirates, whose light, swift vessels could 
run in and out of intricate channels among the dan- 
gerous coral reefs, where government cruisers dare 
not follow, while the people on shore sympathized 
more with the pirates than with the police. 

The East Indian sea-robbers, however, are, as a 
rule, natives of that region — Malays, Bornevans, 
Dyaks and Chinese, with many half-savages of the 
South Sea islands. This is more like a continuance 
of savage resistance to civilization than real piracy, 



134 O ld OCEAN. 

since the pirates of the Atlantic are civilized sailors 
in mutiny against their own people and national com- 
merce. The result is just as bad, though, for these 
East Indians are as bloodthirsty and cruel as can be, 
and if they do not kill their victims, or save them for 
some cannibal feast (as would probably happen in 
the New Hebrides and some other islands), they con- 
demn them to a life of frightful misery. In these 
days of improved vessels and sea-craft, however, 
piracy, even in Malaya, is weak. Our consuls and 
government agents watch suspicious vessels ; our tel- 
egraph warns the naval authorities in a moment; 
our steam-cruisers outspeed the swiftest craft of the 
black flag ; our rifled guns silence their cheap artil- 
lery, and our coast surveys furnish maps so accurate 
that the pirate no longer holds the secret of channels 
and harbors where he can safely retreat. If old 
Redbeard should come back to life and try to be 
king of the seas as he rejoiced to be a couple of 
centuries ago, his pride would be humbled in less 
than a fortnight, and he would gladly return to his 
grave and his ancient glory. 



VIII.— THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 

A MERCHANT is a man who buys and sells 
goods. When these goods are produced or 
manufactured within the country where they are sold, 
we call the buying and selling " domestic trade." 
When they grow or are made by one country and 
sold to another, we call it "commerce." Commerce, 
then, is trade or buying and selling between nations. 
Some countries produce certain things in so great 
abundance that they are of little or no account there, 
though very valuable in some other part of the 
world which lacks them. This "other part," how- 
ever, will be sure to possess in plenty something the 
first region wants. An exchange of these commodi- 
ties constitutes commerce, which may be done over- 
land, as has been the method by camel-trains in Asia 

i35 



136 „ OLD OCEAN. 

for unnumbered centuries, but in our age is chiefly 
carried on by water. 

The original practise in these international trades 
was simple barter, that is, an exchange of a quantity 
of my cargo for a quantity of yours — a chest of tea 
for an equal-sized bale of furs, as used to be done 
between Russians and Chinese at the Thibetan 
border. Now we have money in which we estimate 
the value of this thing and that, independent of its 
bulk, and so sell what we have for cash, and buy 
what we want with the money. The merchants of 
the sea, however, have kept nearer the old method 
than those on land ; and on wild coasts even now 
often make up their cargoes by exchange with the 
natives instead of by purchasing with money, as they 
would in civilized ports. This occurs most fre- 
quently among the South Sea Islands and in South 
Africa. 

The history of shipping which you have already 
read in a previous chapter, will also answer as a 
history of early commerce. It began with the 
Egyptians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and was 
confined to the Mediterranean until quite modern 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 137 

times. Later, in the days of the Roman Empire, the 
trading-ships were as important to them as their 
soldiers ; for nearly every free man was in the army, 
and the slaves made poor farmers. A large part of 
the grain, then, to supply the wants of the people 
had to be brought by water from Egypt, which was 
pretty sure to have "corn," as the Bible calls it, 
when the rest of the world was suffering from short 
crops. Large fleets of grain-ships, convoyed by 
armed vessels, were continually passing between the 
Nile and the Tiber, and so many were the risks they 
ran of wreck or capture, that the arrival of a flotilla 
with its precious freight of food was always a cause 
of rejoicing, at any rate among the poor people of 
the great city. 

With that grand awakening of interest in education 
and industry and discovery in the fourteenth century, 
the city of Venice took the lead in power, and her 
merchants were the most enterprising and wealthy. 
It was the needs of commerce which urged the 
explorations that marked the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, for by this time Venice had her banks — 
the first in the world — and her exchange on the 



138 OLD OCEAN. 

famous Rialto bridge; Genoa was in close rivalry; 
Spain was mining immense quantities of gold and 
silver in South America ; and England was coming 
to the front as a maritime power. The trade with 
Cathay — as all India, China, and the Oriental 
Islands were called collectively — was chiefly by 
caravans across the Persian deserts, and Spain, 
England and Holland had small shares in it, since 
the only water-route known was through the Medi- 
terranean and Red Seas, where, between the extor- 
tionate charges and stealings of the Arabs, who 
carried the cargoes from vessel to vessel across the 
Isthmus of Suez, and the captures by Algerine 
pirates, there was little chance for profit left to the 
shippers. 

To western Europe, then, Vasco de Gama's dis- 
covery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope was 
a long advantage, and England and Holland at least 
were quick to seize it. The great " East India com- 
panies " of the Dutch and English were formed by a 
group of powerful merchants in London and in 
Amsterdam, who were given vast privileges by 
the government in respect to trading in the East. 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 139 

They equipped fleets of merchant and war vessels, 
established forts, carried on small wars along the 
Oriental coasts, and were really little kingdoms 
within kingdoms, because of their wide monopoly 
and enormous wealth. The history of the operations 
of these companies is full of curious interest. Their 
captains and supercargoes — as the men in charge of 
the cargo and business matters of a merchant-vessel 
are called — went into utterly unknown waters, and 
penetrated regions of land where Europeans had 
never been before. They brought home new facts, 
and specimens of human industry or natural products 
entirely novel. They thus enlarged the knowledge 
of Europe about the people and animals and plants 
and scenery of the East, and by taking possession of 
sea-ports and islands for the purposes of trade, 
added broad realms to their home kingdoms. Many 
volumes have been written in relation to the dis- 
coveries, adventures and great transactions of the 
agents of the East India companies, which were the 
forerunners of all our present trade with India, 
China and the South Pacific. 

But those were slow and costly times — though full 



140 OLD OCEAN. 

of a romance impossible now — compared with the 
present. Then a voyage around the world occupied 
three years, and to go from London to Calcutta and 
back took from New Year's to Christmas under the 
most favorable circumstances. Now our steamers 
make it in less than as many days as an East India- 
man would have required weeks. Another important 
change, too, has gradually come about. Formerly, 
the vessels were owned almost entirely by the mer- 
chants themselves, or by a company of them. They 
paid all her expenses, and put into her a cargo of 
their own wares. They would send to China, for 
instance, cotton goods, household furniture, hatchets, 
tools, cutlery and other hardware, farming imple- 
ments and fancy goods of all sorts. In return the 
vessel would bring silks, tea and porcelain, which 
would go into the owners' warehouses and be sold 
in their own shops. The shipper and importer and 
merchant were all one. 

Now this is changed. The importers and mer- 
chants of London, Paris and New York are not often 
those who own vessels and bring their own goods. 
Instead of this they have agents who live permanently 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. I43 

in each of the foreign ports where they buy the goods 
they want, and they hire vessels to bring them home. 
By the old way, the nation which had anything to sell 
carried it to the nation that would buy it, and brought 
back the best pay it could get ; now the merchants 
go to various parts of the world, buy their cargoes 
and order them sent home in substantially the same 
way as you go a-shopping in town. 

This has brought out a new department of sea- 
labor, unknown, as a class, a century ago — the busi- 
ness of carrying goods which the owners of the ves- 
sel have no property in. In Boston, New York, San 
Francisco, and all other sea-board cities of this and 
other countries, the great majority of the vessels are 
owned, not by the merchants of the city, but by 
" transportation companies," who agree to carry car- 
goes at a certain rate. 

In most cases these vessels run back and forth only 
between certain ports, and so constitute " lines," such 
as those between Baltimore and Rio de Janeiro. 
Nearly all the steamships are thus settled in their 
voyages, and depart and arrive with regularity once or 
twice a week, a fortnight, or a month. The merchant 



144 0LD OCEAN. 

or broker, then, who wishes to ship his goods to any 
particular port, knows what vessel goes there regu- 
larly and when she will sail ; or if there is more than 
one line, he chooses between them carefully as to 
safety, speed and cheapness. There is thus sharp 
competition between these ocean-carriers as to which 
shall show the greatest advantages and transport the 
most cheaply, and this is to the benefit of the public. 
In addition to these there are many vessels that be- 
long to no regular lines. Many of them carry large 
numbers of passengers also, in the most comfortable 
way — another modern idea. For people travel far 
more now than they were wont to do in the times of 
"good Queen Bess," or even of our own grandfathers. 
All this rivalry and effort in commerce (with gen- 
erous aid from scientific men and governments) have 
taught navigators much about the ocean, its winds, 
currents, depths and shallows, coasts and harbors. The 
very shortest and safest courses are plotted upon 
charts to every part of the world, and all the ships 
passing to and fro between the greatest ports sail on 
nearly the same courses, so that we have come to 
know these well-followed though invisible tracks as 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 1 45 

" ocean highways." A short sketch of some of these 
tracks will show you how they run. 

The steamship lines between New York and Great 
Britain do not steer straight across the Atlantic, but 
on their way to this country keep well to the north- 
ward so as to get to the west of the Gulf Stream, and 
into the favorable current flowing south from Baffin's 
Bay ; then they skirt Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and 
Cape Cod. Going over, however, the steamers (and 
sailing-vessels too) keep much further south, and 
work along with the Gulf Stream as far as they can. 
From Europe to South America, or through the 
Straits of Magellan on their way to the South Sea 
islands or Australia (though this route is not often 
taken), or to the Pacific coast of the Americas, vessels 
keep close down the African coast, and then steer 
straight ahead from Guinea to Brazil and on down 
the coast. (Put a map before you and you will under- 
stand these courses better.) Sailing-vessels to Eu- 
rope or the United States from Cape Horn, however, 
would swing far out into the South Atlantic to avoid 
heading against the southward coast-current and to 
get the benefit of the southeast trade-wind and the 



146 OLD OCEAN. 

equatorial currents. From New York to the Cape of 
Good Hope or back, the track is nearly straight. 

In the Pacific, the steamer route in summer from 
San Francisco might be five thousand miles as straight 
as a parallel of latitude, only that here, as also 
between New York and Liverpool, navigators adopt 
what is called M great-circle sailing." This consists 
in not heading straight for the port desired, but 
going to it in a curve, by which distance is saved, be- 
cause the rotundity of the globe is avoided. This 
may be hard for you to understand, because I cannot 
stop to explain it here fully, but must refer you to 
the library. 

Sailing-vessels, however, curve so far north in com- 
ing from Japan or China to America, and so far to 
the south going out from San Francisco, in order to 
get into prevailing winds and currents favorable to 
them, that in mid-ocean it is about one thousand 
miles north and south between ships outward bound 
and those coming home. Between California and 
Honolulu a steamer takes a bee-line, but sailing-ves- 
sels find it best to make detours. In summer this 
amounts to steering straight northward until under 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 1 47 

latitude forty degrees, before turning eastward, mak- 
ing more than a right angle to go around. 

I have said that the finding of a sea-route to the 
East around the Cape of Good Hope was a great boon 
to Western Europe and advanced commerce. It re- 
mained so until within the last fifty years. Lately, 
the Corsairs being out of the way, and safety guaran- 
teed in Egypt, merchants and sailors both began to 
wish they had a shorter route between England and 
India. Then, with immense labor and sacrifice, the 
canal was cut across the Isthmus of Suez, and com- 
merce returned to its ancient channel through the 
Red Sea, saving thousands of miles of weary distance 
and much time in each voyage. 

From the end of the Red Sea at Aden, the tracks 
of steamers both ways are straight cuts to Bombay 
and Ceylon, and thence straight up to Calcutta, 
across to Singapore or down to Australia. Except 
East African coast lines, no steamers go around the 
Cape of Good Hope from England, excepting one 
line to South Australia, which steers straight east- 
ward all the way from Cape Town to Adelaide. 
But the Indian Ocean is so situated under the 



148 OLD OCEAN. 

equator, is so filled with "prevailing" winds and 
currents and counter-currents, that sailing-vessels 
must take very roundabout courses, and can by no 
means steer the same track at all seasons of the year. 

I fear you have voted these details dull ; but if you 
will follow them out on an atlas map which marks the 
directions of the trade-winds and the ocean currents, 
you will gather a great deal of interest from the sug- 
gestions and information you will get. 

You can by no means, however, rank all sea-faring 
men as either in the naval or the merchant service. 
There are other classes of industries carried on in 
vessels, the fishing, for instance, which employs 
thousand of men in the United States, and an 
equally large proportion of the citizens of other mari- 
time nations. Then there are the pilots, the yachts- 
men, the whalers and sealers, the coast-guard, the 
life-saving and lighthouse service, the wreckers, 
oystermen, and others who get their living along the 
coast ; besides the ship-builders, riggers, yard-labor- 
ers and iron-workers on shore, the lightermen, 'long- 
shoremen and warehouse hands, the brokers and 
agents, supercargoes and clerks, whose daily bread 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 1 49 

all comes directly from being busy with salt-water 
affairs. Add these all together, and you will find a 
surprisingly large number of men and families thus 
supported. 

For the first-mentioned of these classes, pilots, 
space is left me for a few words in this chapter. A 
pilot is a man who has made himself thoroughly 
acquainted with certain waters where navigation is 
dangerous, and who directs vessels in safety through 
those bad places. A ship-captain may understand 
perfectly the proper course from one continent to 
another and how to handle his vessel in the open 
sea, but he is not expected to know every rock and 
sand-bar crouching under the treacherous waves, and 
all the twistings and obstructions of the narrow en- 
trance into a foreign harbor. Indeed, the naval regu- 
lations will not permit captains to act, though they 
may think they know the channel, since if an accident 
happens when there was no pilot on board, the insur- 
ance money will not be paid. 

Pilots, then, are important men, and they know it 
so well that they charge very high prices for their ser- 
vices (generally rated according to the draft of the 



150 OLD OCEAN. 

vessel), and admit few young men to their ranks to 
be trained. 

Their method of work is very exciting. A dozen or 
so together will form the crew of a trim, staunch 
schooner, provisioned for a fortnight- or more, which 
can outsail anything but a racing yacht, and is built 
to ride safely through the highest seas. You will 
now and then see one of these beautiful little vessels 
sailing up the quiet harbor, threading her way through 
the black steamers and sputtering tug-boats and 
great ships, as a shy and graceful girl walks among 
the guests at a lawn party, and you know from its air 
as well as the big number on its white mainsail that it 
is a pilot boat. 

But these fine schooners and the brave men they 
carry are rarely in port. Their time is spent far in 
the offing of the harbor, cruising back and forth 
in wait for incoming ships, and the New York pilots 
often go two and three hundred miles out to 
sea. There are other pilot-boats waiting also, 
and the lookout at the reeling mast-head must 
keep the very keenest watch upon the horizon. 
Suddenly he catches sight of a white speck 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 151 

which his practised eye tells him are a ship's top- 
gallants, or a blur upon the sky that advertises a 
steamer's approach. The schooner's head is instantly 
turned toward it, and all the canvas is crowded on 
that she will bear, for away off at the right a second 
pilot boat, well down, is also seen to be aiming at 
the same prize, and trying hard to win. The man 
whose turn it is to go on duty, hurries below and 
packs the little valise which holds the few things he 
wants to take home, and the crew's letters ; if it is a 
steamer which is lying there with slowly turning 
wheels and signals flying, he shaves himself and puts 
on a clean white shirt ; but a common sailing-vessel 
is not so honored. 

The storm may be howling in the full force of 
winter's fury, and the waves "running mountains 
high," as we say, but the pilot must get aboard by 
some means. It takes rough weather to make it 
impossible for his mates to launch their yawl and 
row him to where he can clamber up the .stranger's 
side with the aid of a friendly rope's-end. But often 
this is out of the question. Then a "whip" is rigged 
beyond the end of a lee-yard arm, carrying a rope 



152 OLD OCEAN. 

drove through a snatch-block, and having a bowline 
at its end. The steamer slows her engines, or the 
ship heaves to, and the pilot-schooner, under perfect 
control, runs up under the lee of the big ship, as 
near as she dares in the gale. Then, just at the 
right instant, a man on the ship's yard hurls the 
rope, it is caught by the schooner, the pilot slips 
one leg through the bowline-noose, and a second 
afterward the schooner has swept on and he is being 
hoisted up to the yard-arm, but generally not in 
time to save himself a good ducking in the combing 
of some big roller. 

Going on shipboard in this fashion is not favorable 
to an imposing effect ; nevertheless, the pilot is wel- 
comed by officers and seamen and passengers, who 
all admire his courage and trust his skill. 

Now the pilot is master — stands ahead of the 
captain even — and his orders are absolute law. He 
inspects the vessel to form his opinion of how she 
will behave, and then goes to the wheel or stands 
where best he can give his orders to the steersman 
and to the men in the fore-chains who are heaving 
the lead. He must never abandon his post, he must 



THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 153 

never lose his control of the ship, or make a mistake 
as to its position in respect to the lee-shore, or fail 
to be equal to every emergency. If it is too dark 
and foggy and stormy to see, he must feel ; and if he 
cannot do this he must have the faculty of going 
right by intuition. To fail is to lose his reputation 
if not his life. This is what is expected of a pilot, 
and this is what they actually do in a hundred cases, 
the full details of any one of which would make a 
long and thrilling tale of adventurous fighting for 
life. 



IX.— THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 

OEAMEN, however skilful, and pilots, though 
never so knowing, cannot escape the incessant 
danger which attends a seafaring life. Experience 
in reading the signs of the ocean and of the skies, 
surveyors' charts of coasts and harbors, added to the 
appliances of powerful modern machinery, have less- 
ened the perils, it is true, since the old' times; yet 
even now ships sail proudly out of sunny havens, 
their topsails are watched by loving eyes till they disap- 
pear at sunset, and are never seen again. On a calm 
day in 1782 the great hundred-gun line-of-battle-ship 
Royal George sank unwarned into the harbor of Spit- 
head, carrying down almost a thousand souls ; two 
years ago the Atalanta, one of the finest of England's 
modern steam iron-clads, foundered at sea, and not a 
man survived. Each of these vessels was perhaps 
i54 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 1 55 

the best of its kind in the world. Every few years 
an extraordinary gale will prove the ruin of whole 
fleets in a single day, and each week, wrecks happen 
upon the shores of every continent, and sailors lose 
their lives in the most terrible manner. Old Neptune 
is still a match for us, when he asserts himself. 
Nevertheless we must go upon the restless waters, and 
must risk battle with their power; therefore every 
effort has been made by men on land to be of aid to 
their brethren at sea — whose perils grow greater as 
they approach the coast — by erecting lights to guide 
them to the entrance of every harbor, by marking 
the channels so that hidden rocks and shallows may 
be avoided, and by contrivances to save life and 
property when the fury of the gale renders seaman- 
ship useless, and the noble ship is cast away in the 
thundering surf of some wild shore. 

Ever since men began to go to sea, lights have 
been placed on shore to guide them to a landing- 
place ; but in early times these were nothing more 
than fires on headlands. Three hundred years before 
Christ, however, there was built, on an island at Alex- 
andria, a pyramid over four hundred feet in height, on 



156 OLD OCEAN. 

top of which a great fire was kept burning, which, we 
are told, was visible to the corn-ships going to Egypt 
when forty-one miles away on the Mediterranean. 
This pyramid was called the Pharos, and to-day the 
French name for a lighthouse isphare, and the Span- 
ish faro. The rocky coasts on both sides of the Brit- 
ish Channel centuries ago showed beacon-fires on 
very dark nights. These were generally tar-barrels, 
which would burn brightly in a high wind when a fire 
of sticks would be blown away. And they were gen- 
erally lighted for the benefit of the fishermen, by their 
wives, without any authority from government. It 
was an easy matter to imitate such beacons, and bad 
men would often erect false lights, steering by 
which a ship would come crashing to sure destruction 
at the foot of the crags which thrust their cruel edges 
through the surf. When the ship went to pieces, her 
goods coming ashore would be seized and sold by 
the wreckers, as these wicked people were called. 
Many a fearful tradition has come down of the doings 
of wreckers, not only in England and Spain, but in 
America and in the East. One of the tricks of the 
West Indian pirates, when they saw a ship approach- 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 157 

ing their island in the evening, was to hang a lantern 
upon a horse's neck, and let him graze, well hobbled, 
along the beach. This would appear like the rocking 
of a lantern on a vessel at rest ; and, deceived by the 
hope of a safe anchorage, the stranger would only 
discover how he had been cheated when his keel 
struck the sand-bars and the pirates had begun their 
villanous attack. 

Though scaffoldings and towers of wood, iron and 
stone were built here and there at especially danger- 
ous points by governments long before the beginning 
of the last century, they were lighted by fires of wood 
or coal up to 1760, when Smeaton introduced wax 
candles at Eddystone. The Eddystone shoals were 
a group of reefs exceedingly dangerous, because they 
were almost invisible, and lay precisely in the track 
of ships bound up or down the English Channel. 
Two hundred years ago a lighthouse of wood and 
iron trestle-work was built there by Sir Henry Win- 
stanley, and stood so welt that he boasted, like King 
Canute, that the sea had not strength enough to throw 
it down. Soon after, he went out with a company of 
men to make repairs, when one of the worst gales in 



158 OLD OCEAN. 

history arose, and the morning afterward not a trace 
of the structure remained. Another wooden frame 
took its place for several years, but was burned. 
Then the engineer Smeaton proposed to build a 
tower of stone, which should take the shape of a 
massive tree-trunk, with swelling base, like roots, 
founded upon a level floor cut in the rock of the 
reef. This stands to-day, rivalling its magnificent 
neighbor on the Biscay shore opposite, the light- 
house of Carduan, which was built to support a bon- 
fire of oak, but has remained to be lighted succes- 
sively by oil-lamps, by gas-burners, and finally by 
electricity. Thus, everywhere, and in all latitudes, 
the beacons and wooden towers and huge pyramids 
of long ago have given place to slender spires of solid 
masonry, holding powerful signals perhaps hundreds 
of feet above the waves, and visible as far as the 
curve of the earth's surface will permit. Yet in place 
of the sturdy bonfire of oak, or the huge iron cage 
full of coals, there is only a single lamp, whose rays 
are gathered by deep reflectors into a compact bundle 
of unwasted rays, and doubled and redoubled by 
rows of magnifying lenses until they can dart to the 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 



r 59 



furthest horizon in a strong beam of steady light. 
No longer does the mariner trust to his wife to kindle 
the tar-barrel to guide him home. He knows that 
nowhere is his government more watchful of its sub- 
jects than in its lighthouse service, and that he may- 
trust to having that bright signal to welcome him in 
the darkness, as well as he can trust his own eyes to 
see it. The United States alone expends $2,000,000 
annually in looking after her lighthouses, lightships 
and buoys. 

Indeed, these beacons have become so thickly 
planted that it has been found necessary to distin- 
guish between them in order to avoid mistaking 
one for another. Thus some of them are simply 
fixed white lights ; some are white and revolve — the 
whole lantern on the summit of the tower being 
turned on wheels by machinery, and the flame disap- 
pears for a longer or shorter time ; while others are 
white " flash " lights, glancing only for an instant, and 
then lost for a few seconds, or giving a long wink and 
then a short one with a space of darkness between. 
Some lighthouses show a steady red light, others 
alternate red and white. By these colors and vary- 



l6o OLD OCEAN. 

ing periods of appearance and disappearance (pub- 
lished by the government in a book called the Coast 
Pilot) navigators know which light they are looking 
at when several are in sight, as is often the case. The 
beautiful machinery by which the light is produced, 
the lenses are arranged and the revolution of the lan- 
tern effected, I cannot describe here. If you can get 
an opportunity to climb into the top of a lighthouse 
and see it all, you will greatly enjoy it ; and if you can 
be there when a storm is raging, you will never forget 
the scene. 

On some especially dangerous — because hidden — 
reefs or bars, like the shoals off Nantucket, or the 
extreme point of Sandy Hook, it is out of the ques- 
tion or bad policy to erect a lighthouse. Here its 
place is taken by anchoring a stout vessel, built to 
withstand the roughest weather, and arranged to carry 
one or two very large lanterns at its mast-heads. 
These are called "lightships," and they are manned 
by a large crew of keepers who have a very monoto- 
nous time of it, confined in their rolling and pitching 
home with almost nothing to do. It is never a difficult 
thing to find crews for the lightships, though ; there 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. l6l 

is a class of men, much too large I think, who like 
nothing better than to earn their living by doing 
nothing, having no fear of what the French call 
ennui. 

When a big storm tugs at the anchors and drives 
charging squadrons of water to attack the anchored 
vessel, the crew are kept as busy as anybody could 
wish, however, to save their lives and keep their bea- 
cons burning, and it often happens that they go 
adrift and are wrecked. Because this is liable to 
happen when the lightships are most needed, the 
government gets rid of them as fast as it can, and puts 
lighthouses in their place. 

It is fifty years since the last Scottish coal-beacon 
was regularly fired for the mariners, yet the old ways 
occasionally crop out yet, and show that they served 
their purpose not so badly as we are inclined to think. 
Have you not heard of that noble little girl in North 
Carolina, whose father was a lighthouse keeper, but 
went ashore one night, leaving his assistant in charge ? 
The assistant became very ill and insensible, and the 
little girl was unable to light the great lamps. But 
she saw that it was to be a tempestuous night, and 



l62 OLD OCEAN. 

that not only her father could never sail back to her 
without the light, but that vessels might strike the 
rocks. So she wearily carried up the long staircases 
load after load of the dry pitch-pine sticks that 
had been stored for kindling-wood, and, lighting 
these like torches, one by one, she held them up 
inside the lantern, where their blazing was caught, 
magnified and sent out to the relief of the bewildered 
ships, and, best of all for the brave, tired girl, brought 
her father safely to her help. 

Even the electric beam from a first-class lantern 
fails to penetrate a fog to any great distance ; yet 
when the coast is shrouded in thick mist is the 
most dangerous of all times to an approaching ship. 
The only way, in such an emergency, in which a warn- 
ing can be given, is by sound. In many places bells 
are rung ; but often the point to be avoided is so 
placed that the roar of the surf would drown a bell's 
note, and then fog-horns are blown. These fog- 
horns are of a size so immense, and voices so 
stentorian, that it requires a steam engine to 
blow them ; and they utter a booming, hollow 
blast, a dismal note as we hear it when we are 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP, 163 

safe on the land, but sweet to the anxious captain 
whose vessel is laboring through the gloom under 
close-reefed topsails, and uncertain of her exact po- 
sition. One kind of these horns is very complicated 
in its structure, and screeches in a rough, broken 
blare, a note far-reaching beyond any smooth, whistling 
sound that could be made. This shriek is so hideous, 
so ear-splitting, when heard near at hand, that no 
name bad enough to express it could be found ; so its 
inventors went to the other extreme, and called it a 
siren, after those most enchanting of sweet singers 
who tried to entice Ulysses out of his course. This 
name is opposite in a double sense, indeed, for the 
sirens of old lured sailors to wreck, while our siren 
hoarsely bids them keep off. Finally, buoys, which at 
first were simply tight casks, but now are usually 
made of boiler-iron, are anchored on small reefs, to 
which are hung bells, rung constantly by the tossing 
of their support; and on other reefs, buoys are fixed 
having a hollow cap so arranged that when a big wave 
rushes over, it shuts in a body of air, under great 
and sudden pressure, which can only escape through a 
whistle in the top of the cap, uttering a long warning 



164 OLD OCEAN. 

wail to tell its position. Buoys in harbors are also 
made to carry lights, some by ordinary oil-lanterns, 
others by having their hollow interiors rilled with 
greatly compressed gas, which burns in a strong globe 
of glass, and cannot be blown or drenched out. 

But the ordinary duty of the buoy is to mark the 
line of inner channels, and by their color they tell on 
which side of them the pilot must steer. 

To keep the buoys all anchored, replace them if 
lost, or put new ones where needed ; to visit the light- 
ships, and carry provisions and letters to their crews ; 
to see that all the lighthouses are in shape, and the 
various parts of the machinery in good working order, 
is the duty of an inspector, who has a certain dis- 
trict of coast under his care, and continually travels 
up and down it in a steamer called a " tender." 
Generally all the men who have anything to do with 
the lighthouse service must live very lonely lives in 
their towers or on their endlessly rocking hulks. 
There is a small library which the government helps 
circulate among them, and this library ought to be 
increased, for there is no class of men in the world to 
whom reading matter will prove more precious. If 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 1 65 

any of my readers want to give any books or files of 
magazines where they will be appreciated, let them 
send them to the office of the Lighthouse Board at 
Washington, for this library. 

Lighthouses and sirens and buoys and coast sur- 
veys are all intended to prevent shipwreck ; but, as I 
have said, the ocean is still supreme. So we add to 
our precautions arrangements to help those cast away. 
Societies to save wrecked persons have existed in 
China, it is said, for centuries, but in Europe are 
scarcely over a hundred years old ; and the first life- 
boat was not made until 1784. Those European 
humane societies, especially in Great Britain, placed 
life-boats and gears in certain shore towns, and 
organized crews who promise to go out to the aid 
of any loet ship, and to take good care of the persons 
rescued. In America, however, our coasts are so ex- 
tensive, and so much of the dangerous part of them 
is far away from any villages, or even farm-houses, 
that the government was obliged to do anything that 
was to be done. Thus came about the Life Saving 
Service, as it is called, which now has its stations 
close together along our whole sea-coast, and upon 



1 66 OLD OCEAN. 

the great lakes, covering more than ten thousand 
miles in all. 

Each of these stations is a snug house on the 
beach, tenanted by a keeper and six men, all of 
whom are chosen for their skill in swimming, and in 
handling a boat in the surf — something every man 
who " follows the sea " cannot do. 

During all the season, from October till May, two 
men from each station are incessantly patrolling the 
beach at night, each walking until he meets the patrol- 
man from the next station. No matter how foul the 
weather, these watchmen are out until daylight look- 
ing for disasters. The moment they discover a 
vessel ashore, or likely to become disabled, they 
summon their companions, and hasten to launch their 
boat. These boats are of two kinds. On the lakes 
and on the steep Pacific coast is used the very heavy 
English life-boat, fitted with masts and sails if 
necessary, and which a steam tug is required to tow 
to the scene of the wreck, if it is not close in shore. 
But upon our flat, sandy Atlantic beaches a lighter 
kind of surf-boat, made of cedar, can only be 
handled. This is built with air-cases at each end 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 167 

and under the thwarts, so that it cannot sink. The 
station-men drag it on its low wagon to the scene 
of its use, unless horses are to be had, and when it is 
launched, they sit at the six oars, each with his cork 
belt buckled around him, and his eye fixed on the 
steersman, who stands in the stern, ready to obey his 
slightest motion of command, for rowing through the 
angry waves that dash themselves on a storm- 
beaten beach is a matter requiring extraordinary 
skill and strength. Then, when the vessel is reached, 
comes another struggle to avoid being struck and 
crushed by the plunging ship, or the broken spars 
and rigging pounding about the hull. But skill and 
caution generally enable the crew to rescue the 
unfortunate castaways one by one, though frequently 
several trips must be made, in each one of which 
every surfman risks his life, and in many a sad case 
has lost it. 

It is a common occurrence, however, that the sea 
will run so high that no boat could possibly be 
launched. Then the only possibility of rescue for 
the crew is by means of a line which shall bridge the 
space between the ship and the land before the hull 



l68 OLD OCEAN. 

falls to pieces. We read in old tales of wrecks of 
how some brave seaman would tie a light line around 
his waist, and dare the dreadful waves, and the more 
dreadful undertow, to save his comrades. If he got 
safely upon the beach, he drew a hawser on shore 
and made it fast. Now we do not ask this ; but with 
a small cannon made for the purpose, a strong cord 
attached to the cannon-ball is fired over the ship, 
even though it be several hundred yards distant. 
Seizing this line as it falls across their vessel, the 
imperilled sailors haul to them a larger line, called a 
" whip," which they fasten in a tackle-block in such 
a way that a still heavier line can be stretched 
between the wreck and the land, and made fast. 
Then by means of a small side-line and pulleys a 
double canvas bag, shaped like a pair of knee-breeches, 
is sent back and forth between the ship and the 
shore, bringing a man each time, until all are saved. 
Should there be many persons on board, though, and 
great haste necessary, a small covered metallic boat, 
called the life-car, is sent out, into which several 
persons can get at once. 

Such are the principal means of saving life prac- 



THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 169 

tised by the Life Saving Service ; and you will believe 
that they are good in device, and managed with 
great skill and grand courage, when I tell you that in 
1880, out of nearly two thousand persons whose 
lives were endangered by shipwreck upon the Amer- 
ican coasts, all but nine were saved. I wish, as I 
have so often wished before, that I had time to 
tell you a few of the thrilling incidents of which the 
surfmen are the heroes. 



X. — LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 

THE ocean was the home of the first living thing 
that appeared on our planet, either of plant or 
animal ; sea-weeds and salt-water animals are found 
in much older rocks than any that contain the fossils 
of land life. Moreover, though called a " wide waste 
of waters," and seeming a complete desert as we gaze 
upon its restless surface on a dull morning, there are 
a greater number of animals and plants by count, 
and quite as large a variety, under the waves as above 
them, and the bottom of the sea — at any rate near 
its margin — is more populous than the most haunted 
bit of woods you ever saw. 

This was more true, perhaps, of the ancient than it 
is of the present ocean. " The mollusks lived at that 
time," says one of my books, " in such serried and 

compact masses, that their remains have produced by 
170 



LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 171 

their accumulation deep strata and lofty eminences.'' 
Is that hard to understand ? Let me explain it a 
trifle, and also show that not mollusks alone were in 
" serried and compact masses " during the Devonian, 
Silurian and cretaceous ages. 

There exists in our ponds and ditches a race of 
plants so minute that it requires a powerful micro- 
scope to examine them. Under this instrument it is 
seen that they have delicate, flinty shells or armor, 
which is of a great variety of forms — coiled, globular, 
boat-shaped, spindle-like, and so on — and always 
beautifully sculptured. These minute and beautiful 
diatoms, as they are called, move about freely, and 
were long supposed to be animals : now they are 
known to be the simplest of sea-weeds, consisting of 
only one cell. Since life first began, these diatoms, 
and other microscopic plants much like them, have 
swarmed in the fresh waters not only, but in all the 
oceans of the globe, furnishing food for mollusks and 
all the lowly animals whose food is brought into their 
mouths by the currents. Innumerable, and as wide- 
spread as the salt water itself, every one of these 
myriads of minute plants has left a record, for its 



172 OLD OCEAN. 

delicate, glass-like shell was indestructible, and when 
the bit of life was lost, it sank slowly down to the 
bottom. What effect towards perceptible sediment 
could come from a thing so small it would scarcely 
be felt in your eye ? One, or two, or a million, truly 
would go for nothing ; but century after century, 
through ages too long for us to comprehend, a steady 
rain of these exquisitely engraved particles of flint 
showered down upon the still sea-floor, almost as thickly 
as you have seen motes in a sunbeam, until there was 
deposited a layer, many feet in thickness, of nothing 
but diatom-skeletons. Though this went on to a 
greater or less extent everywhere in the sea, such 
deposits are not now to be discovered everywhere, 
because disturbing causes swept the shells away, or 
broke up the floor after it had been laid down ; but 
in various parts of the world to-day, you may find 
wide beds of rock made up wholly of such skeletons, 
soldered together into hard stone ; while in some 
regions the mud of our sea-bottom appears to 
consist of almost nothing else. The mighty chalk 
cliffs of Great Britain and the French coast were 
built up in an ancient sea, whence they have 



LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 1 73 

since been lifted, in precisely the same manner. 

From the simplicity of diatoms the vegetation of 
the sea can be traced upward through larger and 
more complicated kinds of plants until we reach the 
enormous algae that break the gloom of black head- 
lands by their brilliant tints, and furnish a lurking- 
place under their wide-spreading and dense foliage 
for hosts of marine animals — some hiding for safety, 
others to watch for prey. 

Sea-weeds grow in all latitudes, even close to the 
pole, but mainly along the shore, for below the 
depth of about one hundred fathoms none but micro- 
scopic forms are known. These latter float about, of 
course, and many of them have been thought to be 
animals because they seem able to move at their own 
will. They come to the surface as well as haunt the 
depths ; and the Red Sea takes its name from the fact 
that a minute carmine-tinted alga occasionally comes 
to the surface in throngs so dense and wide as to 
tinge the water for miles in extent. The same thing 
occurs in the Pacific, where the sailors call it " sea- 
sawdust." 

The proper home of the sea-weed, however, is a 



174 0LD OCEAN. 

rocky shore between tide-marks or just below them, 
and it is because the eastern coast of the United 
States is rather poor in rocks — at least south of Cape 
Cod — that we are poor in algae, compared with other 
regions. The sea-weed has no roots, and only clings 
to the rock for support ; shifting sand therefore would 
not hold it, and there are great sandy deserts under 
the ocean, bare of algae, just as some land regions are 
sandy deserts naked of terrestrial plants. 

It often happens, however, that masses of weed 
will be torn away from their moorings and set 
adrift. This does not necessarily kill them, and they 
go on flourishing while afloat. This is supposed to 
be the origin of those great areas of " gulf-weed " veg- 
etation in mid-ocean called " sargasso seas." You 
will remember that a branch of the Gulf Stream, 
striking over towards the Moorish coast of Africa, is 
turned southward there, and sweeps down to the 
equator, then westward again. This surrounds a 
broad region in the middle Atlantic whose only cur- 
rents go round and round like a slow whirlpool ; and 
it is here that the gulf-weed concentrates in masses 
which are sometimes dense enough to impede a ship 



LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 1 77 

— Columbus reported among the wonders of his first 
voyage the trouble he had sailing through it — and cov- 
ers an area, between the Azores and the Bahamas, as 
large as the Mississippi valley. This is the Sargasso 
sea ordinarily referred to in books, but it is not the 
only one. A thousand miles west of San Francisco 
there is a similar collection of floating plants ; and 
others exist elsewhere in the southern oceans. 

These floating meadows, as it were, are chosen as 
the abode of a long list of animals that rarely quit 
the safety and plenty of their precincts. Among 
these are innumerable pretty jelly-fishes, sea-worms, 
and mollusks without shells, which cling to the buoy- 
ant plants, and perhaps feed solely upon them. Here 
is to be had in abundance the fairy-like, rare ptero- 
pods, the richly purple janthinas with their curious 
rafts of eggs, and no end of small crabs. Here a 
small fish, something like a perch, spends his whole 
time building a nest like a bird's in the tangled weed- 
masses, and carefully guarding his treasures against 
the large marauding fishes which haunt the vicinity 
to the dread of its peaceful inhabitants ; and here 
those far-flying birds, the wandering albatross and 



178 OLD OCEAN. 

the petrels, hover about in search of something to 
capture and eat. The Sargasso sea is an extremely 
interesting part of the ocean, except to the luckless 
sailor becalmed and balked in its midst. 

In favorable places a surprising variety of sea-weeds 
can be picked out, and books exist by which you may 
learn the method of classification and names of the 
different species. The chief of these books for Amer- 
ica is Harvey's work, published by the Smithsonian 
Institution. Not only in the shape and colors of the 
fronds (as the leaf-like expansions or branching tufts 
of the stem are called), but in size, sea-weeds differ 
greatly among themselves, from the many diminutive 
sorts to the cable-like growths of California, which 
would measure a quarter of a mile in length if stretched 
out. 

Algae, as I have said, constitute, with very few 
exceptions, the whole vegetation of the salt water, 
together with a large part of the vegetation in fresh 
water ; and they serve the same useful purpose there 
that land-plants do for the dry parts of the globe, 
continually making and throwing off the oxygen which 
is necessary to keep the water as well as the air 



LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 1 79 

pure. To this end they do a very important work. 

This is not the whole of their service in ocean 
matters, however. I think it can be said that if it 
were not for sea-weeds, animals could not live in the 
ocean, as truthfully as that if it were not for herbage, no 
animals would be able to exist on land. Sea-weeds 
are fed upon directly by all sorts of salt-water life, from 
mollusks as big as your thumb to turtles the size of 
a dining-table, and they make a shelter for thousands 
of little fellows who never leave their shadow. 

But this is a small part of the story. The diatoms, 
and other minute plants like them, form the main por- 
tion, if not all, the food of a large number of sponges, 
polyps, mollusks and other stationary sluggish creat- 
ures, that otherwise, so far as I see, would not be 
able to live at all. These, in turn, are fed upon by 
larger predaceous animals. Thus, though the fishes 
and cetaceans* may never bite a sea-weed themselves, 
they look for food to creatures that do. We may 
say then that the algae form the basis of all ocean life. 

Men have been able to make marine plants of ser- 



* I dislike a long word like this, but there is no easier English word to cover 
the whales, porpoises, seals, and others of the group of marine mammals 
called Cetacea. 



l8o OLD OCEAN. 

vice to them also. This was more true in former 
years than now. During the last century, for exam- 
ple, the kelp trade was the one great industry of the 
islands at the northern end of Scotland, employing 
thousands of persons, and paying vast revenues to the 
lordly owners of the shores. Kelp was the ashes of 
sea-weed which was burned in kilns of stone and 
brick, clouding the air with huge volumes of strongly 
odorous smoke. The slow burning of the sea-weed 
left the ashes fused into a solid mass, which was 
broken up like stone before being sold. In France 
this was called varec ; and in Spain, where the algae 
were mixed with beach-plants, cultivated for the pur- 
pose, and burned in holes in the ground, it went to 
market as barilla. 

In those days, kelp was the only source of the val- 
uable alkali soda needed in manufacturing glass and 
soap. Then a French chemist discovered how to 
make such soda out of common salt, and the kelp 
ovens were abandoned, except a few in Scotland, 
supplying the demand for iodine. Iodine forms a 
part of all sea-water and sea-weeds, and is used in 
photography and in medicine. It is a curious fact that 



LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. l8l 

barbarous people have long chewed sea-weeds as a 
remedy in the very diseases for which physicians now 
prescribe the iodine extracted from those plants. 
Iodine is a violet dye, too, and the bluish and purple 
tints of many algae, shells and sea animals appears to 
be due to the presence of this element. 

Sea-weed and eel-grass are collected in great quan- 
tities by farmers who live alongshore in all corners 
of the world, as a fertilizer, especially for fruit trees. 
It forms an extremely good manure, because in it 
there is so much of the soda and lime which all plants 
consume ; indeed, there is a kind of sea-weed growing 
at great depths, looking much like a coral, and called 
the nullipore, which takes up so much lime from the 
water that its substance becomes almost like stone, so 
that the plant retains its shape and full size when dried. 
Some of these nullipores are beautifully fan-shaped, 
scarlet or pink, and are often seen in museums, 
marked Corallines. 

Cattle and horses that have been accustomed to 
rough pastures, like the Scotch and Irish moors, eat 
sea-weed and thrive on it, especially as winter fodder, 
and from several species are derived dishes for 



182 OLD OCEAN. 

our own tables. The Irish moss, or carrageen — ■ 
which is not a moss at all, but a sea-weed — is the 
most important of these, and grows on both sides of 
the northern Atlantic. In England the market sup- 
ply comes chiefly from the western coast of Ireland, 
while Massachusetts Bay gives America all that is 
wanted. The little port of Scituate, Mass., is the 
chief point of supply, where, last year, over 400,000 
pounds were gathered. In early June, two or three 
hundred men and women go to the rocks at low tide 
and pick off the small brown plants, each man get- 
ting about a barrel in one day's work. When the 
tide rises, the people get into small boats and pull up 
the moss with rakes. 

The moss gathered each day is taken to the beach, 
where a gravelly space has been prepared, and is 
spread out to lie bleaching during all of the next day, 
when it is taken up, washed in tubs and again spread 
out. This washing and drying in the sun is con- 
tinued for seven days, by which time it has bleached 
to a yellowish white. Should a shower come, the 
moss is heaped up and covered with canvas to protect 
it from injury. 



LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 1 83 

Besides being of value for food, carrageen 
serves to make sizing used by paper-makers, cloth- 
printers, hatters, and so on, to clarify beer in the 
brewery-vats, as a medicine, and to make bandoline 
for stiffening the hair. In cookery, jellies, blanc 
mange and various methods of boiling in milk and 
mixing in soups make it palatable. 

Other species beside the Irish moss serve as food 
in Europe, generally in a raw state, often proving the 
only salty relish which the Irish peasant has to eat 
with his potatoes. One of these is the dulse of the 
Scotch, and the dillisk of Ireland, which also abounds 
in the Mediterranean, and is there made into a soup. 
The natives of the South Sea Islands eat algae which 
is extraordinarily abundant and varied in Oriental 
latitudes ; and the poor among the Japanese and the 
interior of China, where the weed is sent dried, prize 
it especially, because it has a sea flavor and saves 
salt, which with them is a costly luxury. These people 
mix it with vegetables and other materials, and form 
thick, delicious soups and dressings. A peculiarly 
bad-smelling sauce, prepared from sea- weed, is among 
the edibles China sends to Europe as a condiment. 



184 OLD OCEAN. 

Along the shores from Japan to Malaga grows an 
alga which the natives of those coasts dry and keep 
as long as they please. When the substance is wanted 
they steep some of the dried pieces in hot water, 
where the weed dissolves, and then, having been taken 
off the fire, stiffens into glue, said to be the strongest 
cement in the world. 

A kind of false isinglass, also, is a product of the 
Eastern sea-weeds, and not only helps the Chinese 
baker to make his pastry and confectionery, but it 
serves to varnish and glue thin paper and to stiffen 
light and transparent gauzes of fine silk used in mak- 
ing screens, fans, hangings, etc., so that painters can 
decorate them. With a poorer quality the bamboo 
stretchers of paper umbrellas, lanterns and various 
toys are smeared to give them hard and polished sur- 
faces. In China and Japan the sea-weed is not raked 
up but caught by simple machines as the tide drifts it in. 

Lastly, ornaments and small articles of use, like 
knife-handles, are made by several nations out of 
large dried sea-weeds ; and albums of preserved 
fronds are one of the prettiest things to be found in a 
naturalist's cabinet. 



XL— SEA ANIMALS — THE LESSER HALF. 

I HAVE very little space left in which to cover 
the great subject of ocean animals. The old 
idea of the ocean was that it was a vast desert ; but 
now we know that it teems with animal life as densely 
as do the land, fresh waters and the air. In it be- 
gan the life of this globe, for the records of the rocks 
show that the first animals lived in the sea, and that 
ages passed before any began to people the newly 
formed lands, and breathe the atmosphere instead of 
the oxygen of the water. Abundant as ocean life is 
now, the palaeozoic seas held immensely greater hordes, 
and many forms which were giants compared with 
those of our day, just as the monstrous reptiles of the 
cretaceous era vastly exceeded in size the present 
lizards and turtles and frogs. Some of the old 

straight-shells, relatives of our pearly nautilus, were 
185 



l86 OLD OCEAN. 

twelve feet long ; and I have seen fossil ammonites, 
another relative, which when alive must have been too 
heavy for a man to lift. The fishes, too, could tell 
great stories of the glory of their ancestors in size and 
strength and crowded hordes. Some of them wore 
solid coats of mail upon their great heads, and could 
do battle even with the huge swimming reptiles which 
were the dreaded tyrants of the deep. 

Life in the ocean in those old geologic days 
was along guerrilla warfare — every animal guarding 
against attack, and at the same time watching sharply 
for an opportunity to seize and pray upon some 
weaker companion. As for the foraminifera and 
other microscopic fellows, I have already explained 
how countless they were, and how their skeletons, 
singly invisible, have by accumulation built up great 
masses of rock, like the chalk-beds of England and 
France. 

Though lessened in numbers and reduced in size, 
because the land has gradually won over to its 
side many sorts of animals which in former ages 
were exclusively confined to the water, and for 
other reasons, the sea still holds its share of 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 187 

every "branch" and "class" — except birds, and 
many almost claim some of them, like the albatross, 
penguin and petrel — and a majority of the "orders" 
of animal life. Glance at the catalogue : Foramin- 
ifers, sponges and polyps are chiefly confined to salt 
water, starfishes, sea-urchins and the like, wholly so ; 
mollusks (coming next higher) are principally oceanic, 
and the great majority of the crabs inhabit salt water. 
Among the arachnida (the spider order) one species, 
the common " horse-shoe " of our shores, has nothing 
to do with the land, except between tide-marks, and 
remains as the solitary representative of an immense 
and varied group which so crowded the palaeozoic sea- 
bottom that some rocks, for instance the limestones 
of Iowa, are packed almost as full of their fossils as 
a box is of raisins — I mean the trilobites. None of 
the insects that I know of are truly marine ; yet some 
of them are sea-faring, truly, for they spend their lives 
on drifting sea-wrack, or just out of reach of the tides ; 
but most of the true worms are dwellers in the mud 
of the sea-bottom. I have never heard of any 
land fishes yet, but I need not tell you that they 
throng the fresh waters as well as the salt, and that 



l88 OLD OCEAN. 

many species inhabit both at different seasons. 
In respect to the reptiles, of which the ancient 
oceans contained so many gigantic and horrid types, 
I do not know any now that are truly oceanic, if you 
leave out the "sea-serpent," of which we hear so 
many wonderful and not quite satisfactory tales, ex- 
cept the turtles. Of these there are many species in 
various parts of the globe. You will hear of " sea- 
snakes " in the East Indies, but they are only certain 
kinds of serpents which swim well, and pass the most 
of their time in the salt water, as several species of 
our own country do in the rivers and ponds. It is in 
this manner, too, that we may count certain birds, 
such as the petrels, auks, penguins, albatrosses, 
frigate-birds and their kin, as belonging to the ocean. 
They spend all their whole days over the waves, seek- 
ing their food there, and some of them never go 
ashore, except to lay their eggs and hatch their young 
on remote rocks, resting and sleeping on the billows, 
or in the air over them, when not busy at their 
hunting. In the highest rank of all, however, the 
mammals, to which belong the quadrupeds and our 
most noble selves, several families are natives of the 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 189 

"great deep'* — the whales, dolphins and porpoises, 
the seals and walruses, and the manatees and 
dugongs. But all these must come to the surface to 
breathe, not having gills like fishes, but true lungs. 

Everybody has been surprised to learn dur- 
ing the last few years that animals are not con- 
fined to the neighborhood of the shores of the 
ocean alone, but exist far away from it. It is 
only recently that machinery has been invented 
for proper deep-sea dredging. Now naturalists can 
scrape up the soil of the bottom at the depth of even 
three thousand fathoms, or nearly four miles, by 
means of a dredge dragged by a wire rope and worked 
by steam machinery on shipboard. The " Challenger 
Expedition," which a few years ago was sent out by 
the British government on a cruise around the world 
for scientific exploration of the ocean, sank its 
dredges to that depth, and the information gained was 
very interesting. 

It appears that as you go further and further away 
from shore, and into deeper and deeper water, the 
less animals are obtained, and there are very few spe- 
cies indeed which live on shore and also at a greater 



190 



OLD OCEAN. 



depth than about one hundred fathoms. I have 
already explained to you how the majority of species 
of marine animals are spread in limited areas of sea, 
beyond which other species take their place, and that 
it is not always easy to see why a certain sort of cowry, 
for example, should be found only along a particular 
strip of coast, when there is nothing that we can see 
to prevent its extending its range much further. It is 
believed that the temperature or the water is the chief 
fact which sets these invisible boundaries to the wan- 
derings of animals living near the surface, only a few 
of which are very widespread in their distribution. 

Now in deep-sea life the case is different. Here tem- 
perature cannot be of so much account, since only a 
short distance down, the water becomes almost as cold 
as ice, and preserves this uniform chill all around the 
globe. The life found at a great depth, too, is very 
widespread, instead of restricted in its range, often 
occurring in two or more ocean basins ; but here the 
restriction is an up-and-down one, rather than side- 
wise, and the secret is found in the word pressure. 
There are very few animals able to live in the shallows 
and also under the enormous weight of sea water 




LOBSTER-FISHING. 




PEA.RL-OYSTER FISHING. 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 1 93 

three or four miles deep. To most of them a great 
variation in the pressure of the water to which they 
are accustomed proves fatal, just as men and other 
animals breathing air cannot survive when they rise 
into the thin atmosphere beyond a certain height, or 
are placed where air is greatly condensed. Thus we 
find layers of animal life in the ocean from the 
shallows to the abysses. 

The most striking example of this, I think, is the 
case of coral-reefs. The foundations are laid by the 
millions of minute individuals of one solid, heavy 
sort of coral which can grow only in pretty deep 
water. When these have reached their highest 
growth, a second kind colonizes itself upon the sum- 
mit of this foundation, and carries the work a little 
way further. Then a third kind takes it up and brings 
the structure to the top, where many surface corals, 
corallines, and various other animals help to erect a 
dry reef, upon which vegetation can find root-hold, 
and, after a while, men may live. 

There is so much to say about sea-animals, and so 
little time to say it, that I must only glance at the 
subject in a single way — utility to man. 



194 OLD OCEAN. 

Men make use of something in nearly every branch 
of ocean-life, from humblest to highest. The lowest 
of all, as I have already said, are the foraminifers ; it 
is their skeletons which make up our common chalk. 
A close ally of theirs is the sponge, of which there 
are a dozen or so varieties sold in the shops. Sponges 
come chiefly from the Mediterranean, the Persian 
and Ceylonese waters of the Indian Ocean, and from 
the gulf coast of Florida. In the Old World they 
are obtained chiefly by diving. Men who are trained 
from boyhood to this work, go out to the sponge- 
ground in boats, on fine days. Fastening a netting- 
bag about their waists, and taking a heavy stone in 
their hands, they dive head-foremost to the bottom — 
often twelve or fifteen fathoms below — tear the 
sponges from the rocks and rise with a bag-full, to be 
dragged almost utterly exhausted into their boat, 
often fainting immediately after. This requires them 
to hold their breath under the water for two minutes 
or more ; but none but the most expert can do that, 
and a diver does not live long. In Florida, however, 
the sponge-gatherers do not dive, but go in ships to 
where the sponges grow, and then cruise about in 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 195 

small boats, each of which contains two men. One 
of these steers, while the other man leans over the side 
searching the bottom. In order to see it plainly, he 
has what he calls a " water-glass." This is a common 
wooden pail the bottom of which is glass. Pressing 
this down into the water a few inches he thrusts in 
his face, and can then perceive everything on the 
bottom with great distinctness. When he sees a 
sponge he thrusts down a long stout pole, on the end 
of which is a double hook, like a small pitchfork set 
at right angles to the handle, and drags up the cap- 
tive. 

Having got the sponges, they must go through long 
operations of rotting, beating, rinsing, drying and 
bleaching before their skeletons — which is all we 
want — are fit for use. Only a few out of the large 
number of species of sponges are serviceable, how- 
ever. 

The living skeletons of the coral polyps form what 
we term " corals." The round white ones and the 
variously branching ones may come from any one of 
several parts of the equatorial half of the globe, and 
are of value chiefly as mantel ornaments. The red 



196 OLD OCEAN. 

coral of which necklaces and other bits of jewelry are 
made is procured by divers in the Mediterranean, 
and its gathering keeps hundreds of men busy. 

Rising to starfishes and sea-urchins,. I can only 
say that the starfishes interest oystermen because 
they prey upon their oysters ; but in old days it was 
thought that medicines made out of the " stars " and 
" sea-eggs " were very potent in certain diseases. 
The trepang, which is dried and eaten by the Chinese 
and East Indians, belongs here too. 

Coming to crabs — do we not eat them from the 
delicate " shedder " to the huge lobster ? On the 
coast of Maine there are whole villages which live 
almost entirely by catching lobsters and canning 
them to send abroad. In Virginia and in North Car- 
olina at certain seasons, hundreds of men are busy 
catching and shipping crabs for market, and in 
Louisiana large factories are devoted to canning 
shrimps. 

This brings us to the class of mollusks, in our 
glance at the useful animals of the ocean ; and, to 
prove their importance, it is enough to remind you 
that here belong the " shellfish " — the oyster, clam, 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 197 

mussel, scallop, cockle and all the rest (not a few) 
which are edible. I find by my study of the subject, 
that of oysters alone there are taken from the waters 
of the coast of the United States each year almost 
twenty-three millions of bushels, for which the oyster- 
men get about $13,500,000. That business forms 
the sole support of perhaps a hundred thousand per- 
sons in this country alone. And there are oysters 
and clams and other shellfish all round the globe, 
forming one of the most important of all the natural 
supplies of food. The savages knew this, as the great 
shell-heaps, ancient and modern, to be found piled 
upon all coasts, plainly show. 

But mollusks are not useful as food alone. Their 
shells are applied to many purposes. We burn them 
into excellent lime ; we cut them up by the million 
into buttons and studs and small objects like parasol- 
handles, and we polish them into ornamental shape 
for our centre-tables. In the city of Newark, I am 
told, there are three factories devoted to the manu- 
facture of shell buttons and mother-of-pearl goods 
alone. And many ship-loads of shells from the West 
Indies and California come into New York annually 



198 OLD OCEAN. 

to supply this trade, which employs so many hands 
in profitable labor. 

Mother-of-pearl is the bright inside surface, or 
nacre, of the large oyster which gives us pearls. This 
— in one or another form — exists in various parts 
of the world ; but in America the only fishery for 
the pearl oyster is in the Gulf of California, and that 
is by no means as productive as it used to be. The 
season for pearl-fishing on the Pacific coast of Mex- 
ico is from June to December, but the diving can be 
done only in good weather, and for about three hours 
at the time of low water, since the tide there rises 
twenty feet, which would make a large dive of itself; 
and, besides, the currents are troublesome during 
high water. 

At the right hour the Mexicans go out in their 
canoes, one man of the four or five in each canoe pad- 
dling, while the rest scrutinize the bottom. It may 
be rocky and weed-grown, but the water is clear, and 
their practised eyes detect a single round oyster where 
you or I certainly would overlook a dozen of them. 
Then down a man goes and brings up his prize, with 
perhaps some additional ones. Sixty or eighty feet 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 199 

is not too deep for these adventurous divers, who 
will stay a whole minute upon the bottom, picking up 
oysters and putting them into a basket sunken before- 
hand, where a quantity of shells has been discovered. 
No food is eaten by these men on the day they 
dive, until their labor is done. 

The divers could tell us some entertaining things 
about their experiences in the mysterious world 
under the waves, if they had the faculty of descrip- 
tion. Drowning is only one of many dangers that 
threaten them. The warm waters in which they 
work are the home of the largest and most deadly 
sharks, and of various other submarine creatures 
one would far rather read about than meet in his 
own element. Of them all sharks are the most to 
be dreaded ; as a rule, however, they are easily fright- 
ened away, or can be avoided by the clever swimmer, 
who quickly stirs up the mud of the bottom, and 
rises in the fog before the dull shark discovers 
that he is gone. The natives of the East Indies 
are said to fight the sharks quite fearlessly, stabbing 
them with knives as they roll over. I have read a story 
to the effect that formerly the Mexican Indian divers 



2 00 OLD OCEAN. 

On our Western coast used to take down with them 
a stick of hard wood about two feet long and sharp- 
ened at both ends. When a shark was encountered 
from which they could not readily escape, they would 
snatch this weapon from their belts, grasp it in the 
middle, and thrust it dextrously crosswise into the 
widely distended mouth of the monster opened 
to seize them. To shut down his jaws upon such a 
skewer would undoubtedly discomfit a shark or any- 
thing else ; but when one thinks of the time, nerve, 
and sure aim it would require to accomplish this 
feat, he begins to doubt whether really it ever was 
tried. I advise you, therefore, to prove the story 
better than I have been able to do, before you pin 
all your faith to it. 

All the oysters when brought ashore are opened 
in vats of water, and carefully examined for the 
pearls they may contain half embedded in their 
mantles; but very few reward the diver with pearls 
worth selling separately or except by weight. Many 
divers, therefore, do not themselves take the trouble 
of opening what they catch, but sell them unopened 
at a few cents a dozen, preferring the small pay 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 20T 

and no risk to a chance for more money with so 
much additional work. 

The round, flat, beautiful shells are all saved, 
and their sale ( for mother-of-pearl work ) brings 
nearly as much money into the pearl-fishing com- 
munities in the course of a season as the pearls 
themselves are worth. 

We are not only gathering and utilizing the lower 
invertebrate creatures of the ocean in all these 
ways, but we are beginning to cultivate an artificial 
supply of the most important of them, such as the 
food-mollusks. The Romans, away back in the days 
of Horace, raised oysters in ponds along the Italian 
coast, and Eastern nations preserved the custom 
during the mediaeval centuries when Europe was do- 
ing little except quarrelling, and making pretty pictures 
on parchment. Recently the French of the Channel 
coast took it up, and the English followed, finding 
that their natural oyster and mussel beds were be- 
coming exhausted. The same fate has overtaken 
our own oyster-beds everywhere north of the Ches- 
apeake, until now nearly all the oysters brought to 
market have been raised upon private planted beds. 



202 OLD OCEAN. 

An oyster-farm is conducted in two ways. One is 
to place upon a certain space of bottom, leased in 
some shallow bay, as many young oysters as it will 
conveniently hold. These young oysters (generally 
hardly bigger than your thumb-nail) are dredged in 
summer from certain reefs in deep water, where the 
oysters are never allowed to grow to full size ; and to 
a large extent they are brought by the ship-load from 
Maryland and Virginia, which have more " seed," as 
it is called, than they need for their own planting. 
These young oysters, watched against harm, and hav- 
ing plenty of space to grow in, come to a proper size 
for market in from one to three years, and are then 
gathered by their owners and sold. 

Another method is to spread old shells, pebbles, 
etc., on the bottom, to which the floating eggs of 
adult oysters in the neighborhood adhere. This 
thick "catch" of seed is then taken up and respread 
in a thinner way upon new ground, and is allowed to 
grow to maturity. The oysters raised by either of 
these methods are of better appearance and taste, as 
a rule, than those that grow naturally. 

Mussels, clams of many varieties, and even sponges 



SEA ANIMALS THE LESSER HALF. 203 

and peak-shells, are also cultivated to some extent, 
each according to the plan its natural habits make 
advisable. In this way certain great areas of favora- 
ble ocean-bottom have become as valuable as the 
neighboring shore-land, or even far more so, if you 
compare, acre for acre, the yields of the crops below 
with that above the water-line. 



XII. — SEA ANIMALS. — THE GREATER 
HALF. 

1"T is almost impossible for one whose home is in- 
-*- land, to realize to what an extent the sea enters 
into the industries of the people who live on its bord- 
ers, and to what an extent a whole country is indebted 
to its adjacent ocean. This indebtedness arises in a 
great variety of ways, the most important of which 
are supplying food, and the education of a class of 
men whose peculiar services are often of the greatest 
value to their fellow-citizens. 

The vegetables and lower animals of the sea which 
serve as food, we have already studied ; those ani- 
mals higher in the scale remain for this article, and 
they are many, — ■ fishes, turtles, seals, walruses and 
whales. Each of these classes possesses a large va- 
riety and great numbers of individuals, while some of 
• 204 



SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 205 

them yield other products of value beside their eata- 
ble flesh. 

The right to catch fish has always been held one of 
the most valuable privileges a colony or nation could 
enjoy, and more than one war has been engaged in 
over this privilege ; indeed, the old French wars that 
tormented the New England colonies and the mari- 
time provinces of Canada, previous to the Revolution- 
ary war, were fought largely, if not wholly, upon this 
question. By our Puritan forefathers, and by the 
early settlers of New York and New Jersey, the fish- 
ing along the coast was esteemed one of the highest 
inducements for coming to the new land, and it was 
talked about in a way that seems queer to us who 
have so many other interests ; but the forefathers 
were careful to have a strong clause in the Massa- 
chusetts charter as to their right over and ownership 
of every sort of fish and fishing, and more than once 
success in their boats was all that saved whole towns 
from starvation. The same is true still in other 
parts of the world, and some savage tribes, particu- 
larly in northern regions, depend almost wholly on 
fish for their support. Take away his salmon from 



206 OLD OCEAN. 

the Vancouver Island Indian, and he would starve to 
death, I fear. 

Sea-fishing is carried on extensively along the 
coasts of China and Japan, on both sides of Behring's 
straits, on the Californian coast, in the Mediterranean 
and elsewhere ; but the chief fishing grounds of the 
world, I think, are in the North Atlantic, and partic- 
ularly off the coast of Newfoundland. It is on the 
waters of this ocean that fishermen congregate under 
the greatest nnmber of different flags, and hailing from 
the greatest distances. To the skill and eagerness of 
the Norse fishermen - — rovers indeed — do we owe the 
first voyages extending their course, by degrees, until 
the Orkneys, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland suc- 
cessively were discovered. 

The Banks of Newfoundland are a series of shoals — 
submerged islands, in fact — which lie off the north- 
eastern coast of America from Cape Cod to the farther 
end of Newfoundland. The shallowness of the water 
over them makes them advantageous places for fish- 
ing, because many of the species caught, remain near 
the bottom, and in deep water are therefore beyond 
convenient reach. It is possible, also, to anchor 



SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 207 

on the Banks — a necessity for most fishing. 
Cod, halibut, hake, haddock, mackerel and herring 
are the fishes chiefly taken in the North Atlantic, 
winter being the most favorable time, except for 
mackerel. Along our coast more southerly, men- 
haden, shad and mullet fishing employ great num- 
bers of men, while on the southern coasts of Europe 
the catching and preserving of sardines, whitebait and 
anchvies is of great importance to the shore-people, 
beyond the ordinary fishing. 

Of all these, cod-fishing takes the lead, at least in 
America, hundreds of vessels gathering year after year 
upon the Banks and loading deep with their captures. 
To go cod-fishing the staunchest vessels are required, 
for terrible storms are often encountered. These 
vessels are of the swiftest model, also, for they must 
make quick voyages to and fro, in order to save time 
and beat their rivals. Their rig is adapted to this 
purpose, and spreads almost as much canvas as a 
racing-yacht. The best of them all, perhaps, belong 
at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and are never used for 
any other purpose. 

Formerly, all the fishing for cod, halibut and the 



2o8 OLD OCEAN. 

rest was by the hand-line, but now this is nearly given 
up, except in the case of mackerel, and the trawl has 
taken its place. The trawl consists of a strong rope, 
between three and four hundred feet long, having at 
each end an anchor and a flag-buoy. It is so ar- 
ranged that when it is stretched out and anchored the 
line will be several fathoms beneath the surface. To 
this line, at intervals of six feet or so, are hung short 
lines, each carrying a stout hook. When the fishing- 
ground has been reached, the captain anchors his 
vessel, or, if the weather permits, he sails gently to 
and fro. Previously, six trawls have been baited with 
clams brought from home, and one put in each of the 
six small boats which the vessel carries. Two men 
now put off in each of these boats and anchor the 
trawls at convenient distances from each other, in 
such a way that the trawl-line, with its fringe of hooks, 
shall be stretched taut and at the proper depth. How 
long they stay down depends on the weather — five 
or six hours, or from evening until morning, is the 
usual length. Then the men go out, and taking up 
the anchors at one end, haul each trawl into the boat, 
coiling it in the bottom and taking off the hooks 



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SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 211 

each captive fish as fast as they come to it. 
Simple as this sounds, it is terribly hard work. 
The trawls are heavy and stiff, and armed with dan- 
gerously sharp hooks. The busiest season is mid- 
winter, and no dread of cold or danger must stop the 
fisherman who boldly ventures in his little dory into 
the teeth of a howling snow-storm, and fast-increas- 
ing gale, piling the water " mountain-high " about him 
and encasing his body in a sheet of icy spray ; this 
must he do in spite of discomfort and the imminent 
risk of death, if he would save from destruction his 
valuable trawls and the booty they may have hooked 
for him. A fine day on the Banks of Newfoundland 
is a rare thing ; fog and snow and icy gales are the 
rule, and only the greatest courage, endurance and 
skill would enable a man to resist the ocean and 
wrest from it his self-support : 

" Brave are the hearts that man 
The fishing-smacks of Gloucester, 
The sea-boats of Cape Ann.'* 

The thrilling tales these men can tell of escapes 
from death, and of exciting moments of contest with 



212 OLD OCEAN. 

the tempest, would go far ahead of any imagined 
peril ever thought of ; but they cannot be written out — 
especially in so brief a space as these papers are 
allowed — without losing so much of their salt sea- 
flavor that they would sound very flat, I fear. 

But the cod, halibut and mackerel fisheries are not 
the only ones that claim the steady efforts of the fifty 
thousand or more men whom the last census reports 
as getting their living by means of these industries. 
All along the coast from Maine to New Jersey are 
caught the menhaden, or pogies, or bunkers, or bony 
fish, as this useful little member of the "finny tribe" 
is called in various regions. The menhaden is shaped 
much like a shad, but of smaller size, rarely exceeding 
a foot in length. It travels about in companies or 
"schools," which may contain from ten thousand to 
five hundred thousand, and which move hither and 
thither in a solid mass in search of food. The food 
sought consists of the minute transparent animals 
that crowd near the surface of the summer sea, and 
are never suspected by any one, except, perhaps, the 
naturalist who, with his towing-net and microscope, 
captures them for his aquarium, and draws their elfin 



SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 213 

portraits. The open-mouthed pursuit of this small 
and lively prey leads the menhaden so close to the sur- 
face that the fisherman-lookout sees from his mast- 
head the flit of their tails, and catches through the 
blue wash of overlying water the gleam of their red 
backs flashing beneath as they crowd one another in 
rushing and wrangling haste. 

The menhaden fishery is carried on in trim little 
steamers, behind which are towed two yawls carrying 
a great net, part of which is in each boat, a few feet 
of the middle of the net stretching between them. 
The moment the " color " of a school is reported by 
the lookout, is a moment of immense excitement on 
board the steamer. The crews rush to the boats and 
pull them away toward their prize with the greatest 
speed, while the steamer, left in charge of the cook 
and engineer, slows her speed and gracefully swings 
around to aid the boats at the proper time. 

In each boat stands a man whose business it is to 
pay out the net coiled in the prow ; and when the 
boats have approached near enough to the men- 
haden — which must not be alarmed or they may 
dart away by diving — the captain orders the net 



214 OLD OCEAN. 

thrown. Then the two men work like heroes casting 
the heavy netting overboard, while the two yawls 
pull away from each other, and in a circular direc- 
tion, gradually surrounding the school of fish, their 
track being marked by the line of cork-floats left be- 
hind and supporting the net cast overboard. It is 
not until the ring of corks and netting has nearly 
closed into a complete circle around them, that the 
fish become really terrified and seek to escape. Then 
it is too late for any but a few of them, since the boats 
have drawn nearly together, and they are surrounded 
by an invisible wall of netting hanging many fathoms 
deep. Rushing from side to side, they push out this 
yielding wall, but cannot go through its firm meshes. 
By and by they would dive down and learn to go 
underneath it, but the fisherman has guarded against 
this by reaving through loops along the lower edge of 
the net a rope, to the end of which is fastened a 
heavy weight. The moment the circle of the net is 
completed about the imprisoned fish, this weight is 
pitched overboard. Sinking rapidly to the bottom it 
pulls along with it the rope at the bottom of the net, 
which, sliding through the loops, acts as a puckering- 



SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 215 

string to draw the bottom of the net together in the 
centre and transform it into a huge bag or purse. 

This done, the fishermen pull into their boats as 
much of the net as they can drag over the gunwale. 
This is terribly hard work. The water is often rough 
(I have seen them working when the crest of each 
wave was high enough to hide the steamer's masts 
only a couple of hundred yards away ), and though all 
haul together, the struggles of the host of the fishes 
and the weight of the wet net allows the men to 
take only a portion back into the yawls. Then the 
steamer comes up, the net is fastened like a bag be- 
tween the steamer's side and the two boats, and the 
menhaden are ladled out and tumbled, like a flashing 
shower of silver and mother-of-pearl, into the dark 
hold, perhaps a hundred or two hundred thousand at 
a single catch. 

The menhaden are not eaten, but taken to factories 
on the beaches where they are boiled by steam in 
deep vats and then put through a mill that presses the 
rich oil out of them. The refuse of bones and scales 
is mixed with bone-dust, etcetera, and made into a land- 
fertilizer. Many millions of these fishes are thus 



2X6 OLD OCEAN. 

taken and used each year, but there seems no dimi- 
nution of their numbers ; while the cod-fish, which in 
" the good old Colony times," were abundant in New 
York bay, in Long Island Sound, off Cape Cod — 
whence its name — and Cape Ann, have now been 
driven to the far away " Banks," in an effort to escape 
the incessant pursuit that follows them wherever they 
may retreat. It is so likely that a few more years — 
or at least a few more decades — will see their extinc- 
tion, that the United States Fish Commission has 
been breeding codfish artificially and seems to be suc- 
ceeding in restocking a portion of Massachusetts bay. 

These are only glimpses of the ways of sea-fishing 
and fisher-folk — ways of hardship and peril, absence 
from home, pleasant things and means of education 
in books. But harder even than the lives of the 
Bank and menhaden fishermen, are the duties of the 
sealers and whalers. 

Seals are of great variety, and of the greatest utility 
to the natives of the Arctic and Antarctic regions 
where they chiefly live. The Eskimos and the Alas- 
kans depend upon the seals almost wholly for food 
(outside of their fish-diet), clothing, fire, and lamp- 



SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 217 

light, tools and weapons. It is surprising how great 
a variety of purposes the body of the seal is made to 
serve ; and, equally, the skill with which the active 
animal is killed and his carcass secured with savage 
weapons. 

To the civilized world seals are valuable for their 
skins and oil, and walruses for skins, oil and ivory 
tusks. The skins are employed as material for 
leather, and on account of their fur. The fur-bearing 
seals, from which cloaks and muffs and collars are 
made, all live on certain islands in Alaska, where they 
appear every summer, departing in winter to the open 
sea, — nobody knows exactly where. So easily killed 
were these great unwieldy beasts at these summer 
haunts, that the government has found it wise to 
make laws that no more than one hundred thousand 
shall be killed in one year. This saves them from 
extermination, and keeps up the price of the fur so 
that the native population is able to support itself in 
steady prosperity. Though the " fur seal," properly 
speaking, belongs wholly to Alaska, there is an Atlan- 
tic fur seal which formerly was much used by furriers, 
but is now of small consequence. 



2l8 OLD OCEAN. 

In the early spring, there come floating down with 
the drifting ice from the Arctic regions great numbers 
of seals, of three or four species, with their young. 
Then there are fitted out in Canada, Newfoundland, 
Scotland and Sweden, very strong iron steamships, 
manned by men who go to meet this ice-raft in the 
stormy seas northeast of Newfoundland, and rob it 
of its freight. Fastening their vessels to the pack, or 
working their way among the broken floes, as do 
Arctic navigators, the sealers brave the double perils 
of ocean and ice in search of the gentle little animals 
whose misfortune it is that they can be made useful 
to men. Having sighted a band huddled together 
with their baby seals, the crews land on the ice and 
attack them with clubs, one hard blow being enough 
to kill the innocents in most cases. Having slaugh- 
tered all the men have strength or time for, the bodies 
are hastily skinned in such a way that the heavy layer 
of fat, or "blubber," comes off with the hide, which is 
then taken on board the ship. 

Sometimes the ice breaks up when the crews are 
busy in killing; or a sudden squall causes the ship to 
break loose and drift away ; or the boats returning to 



SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 21 9 

the ship are lost in fogs and snow-storms, so that the 
dangers which face the sealer are far more than those 
of the ordinary seaman. Arrived at home from his 
cold, perilous, exhausting and inhuman work, he sells 
his sealskins to be made into leather, and the blubber 
to be converted into oil. Large fleets of staunch 
steamers and hundreds of sturdy men engage in these 
expeditions every year, which yield millions of dollars 
to the pockets of sailors and owners; but it is all 
confined to the northernmost towns on both sides of 
the Atlantic. 

Whaling used to be one of the very first industries 
of the sea, but has now fallen into decay, — an event 
brought about partly by the decrease of the whales 
through incessant chasing, and partly by the dis- 
covery of petroleum, which took the place of whale- 
oil for many purposes. 

Old records say that whales of all kinds were com- 
monly seen all along our eastern coast, and in all the 
harbors. In those days every shore town had its 
boat and crew, who were accustomed to go off from 
shore on a moment's notice and attack the "levia- 
than." As the increase of population and shipping 



220 OLD OCEAN. 

used up or drove away all the whales near shore, 
ships were fitted out to go after them at a distance, 
and the American colonies soon held their own with 
the whalers of Europe. Boston, the Cape Cod towns, 
Nantucket, New Bedford, New London and Sag 
Harbor (Long Island), were the chief headquarters of 
whaling, and are so yet; indeed Nantucket, New- 
Bedford, New London and Sag Harbor were formed 
almost wholly by the whaling and have made very 
little progress since it declined. 

Whaling was at its height (at least in America) 
about thirty years ago, and a hundred years ago was 
worth nearly as much as it is now. In 1853 the total 
value of whales (oil and bone) taken was about fif- 
teen millions of dollars ; last year it was only a third 
as much. 

The whaling vessels were large staunch ships, and 
carried crews of strong, skilful men. They would sail 
on voyages lasting two or three years, and some- 
times would circumnavigate the globe and return 
without having touched at a port. As a rule, how- 
ever, they would gain part of a cargo, and then go to 
some port, ship it to London or New York, and refit 



SEA ANIMALS. THE GREATER HALF. 221 

for a new voyage. The profits of a trip were thus 
very great sometimes, but other trips were attended 
by only expense and misfortune. 

To the whalers we owe the discovery of many new 
lands and many facts in geography and navigation. 
At their mastheads flew the first American flags ever 
seen in the Pacific, and they annually added to our 
map of the polar regions by their adventurous strug- 
gles northward in search of new hunting-grounds. 
England owes to them first her colonies in the South 
Pacific. 

The intrepid and skilful voyages, daring every fa- 
tigue and danger in the open sea, of our whalers and 
fishermen have been schools for the best seamen of 
the world. Every nation is glad to draw these sail- 
ors into their navies, and it is they who make the 
bravest yet most cautious captains of our merchant 
marine, showing to their comrades and to landsmen 
splendid examples of heroism and fortitude. This 
schooling I mean when I say that in its industries, 
we get not only food, but formation of character from 
Old Ocean. 



New Publications. 



The Pettibone Name. By Margaret Sidney. The V I F 
Series. Boston: D. Lothiop & Co. Price $1.25 If the 
publishers had offered a prize for the brightest, freshest and 
most brilliant bit of home fiction wherewith to start off this 
new series, they could not have more perfectly succeeded 
than they have in securing this, The Pettibone Name, a story 
that ought to create an immediate and wide sensation, and 
give the author a still higher place than she now occupies in 
popular esteem. The heroine of the story is not a young, 
romantic girl, but a noble, warm-hearted woman, who sacri- 
fices wealth, ease and comfort for the sake of others who are 
dear to her. There has been no recent figure in American 
fiction more clearly or skillfully drawn than Judith Petti- 
bone, and the impression made upon the reader will not be 
easily effaced. Most of the characters of the book are such 
as may be met with in any New England village. Deacon 
Badger, whose upright life and pleasant ways make him a 
universal favorite; little Doctor Pilcher, with his hot temper 
and quick tongue; Samantha Scarritt, the village dress- 
maker, whose sharp speech and love of gossip are tempered 
by a kind heart and quick sympathy, and the irrepressible 
Bobby Jane, all are from life, and all alike near testimony 
to the author's keenness of observation and skill of delinea- 
tion. Taken altogether, it is a delightful story of New En- 
gland life and manners; sparkling in style, bright in incident, 
and intense in interest. It deserves to be widely read, as it 
will be. 

Life and Public Career of Horace Greeley. By 
W. M. Cornell, LL. D. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price 
$1.25. This is a new edition of a popular life of Greeley, the 
first edition of which was early exhausted. It has been the 
author's aim to give a clear and correct pen picture of the 
great editor, and to trace the gradual steps in his career from a 
poor and hard-working farmer boy to the editorial chair of the 
most powerful daily newspaper in America. The book has 
been thoroughly revised and considerable new matter added. 



New Publications. 



Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. By 
Margaret Sidney. 111. Boston : D. Lothrop & Co. Price 
$1.50. Of all the books for juvenile readers which crowd 
the counters of the dealers this season, not one possesses so 
many of those peculiar qualities which go to make up a per- 
fect story as this charming work. It tells the story of a 
happy family, the members of which, from the mother to the 
youngest child, are bound together in a common bond of 
love. Although poor, and obliged to plan and scrimp and 
pinch to live from day to day, they make the little brown 
house which holds them a genuine paradise. To be sure 
the younger ones grumble occasionally at having nothing 
but potatoes and bread six days in the week, but that can 
hardly be regarded as a defect either of character or disposi- 
tion. Some of the home-scenes in which these little Pep- 
pers are the actors are capitally described, and make the 
reader long to take part in them. The description of the 
baking of the birthday cake by the children during the 
absence of the mother ; the celebration of the first Christ- 
mas, and the experiences of the family with the measles are 
portions of the book which will be thoroughly enjoyed. A 
good deal of ingenuity is displayed by the author in bring- 
ing the little Peppers out of their poverty and giving them a 
start in life. The whole change is made to turn on the 
freak of the youngest of the cluster, the three-year old 
Phronsie, who insisted on sending a gingerbread boy to a 
rich old man who was spending the summer at the village 
hotel. The old gentleman afterlaughing himself sick at the 
ridiculous character of the present, called to see her, and is 
so taken with the whole family that he insists upon carrying 
the eldest girl home with him to be educated. How she 
went, and what she did, and how the rest of the family 
finally folio wed her, with the rather unlooked-for discovery of 
relationship at the close, make up the substance of a dozen 
or more interesting chapters. It ought, for the lesson it 
teaches, to be put into the hands of every boy and girl »n 
the country. It is very fully and finely illustrated and 
bound in elegant form, and it will find prominent place 
among the higher class of iuvenile presentation books &** 
coming holiday season. 



